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  • Leptodea fragilis: Gretchen Benjamin, director of the large rivers program for the Nature Conservancy, displays one of the fragile papershell mussels she found in the Wabash River Tuesday north of Terre Haute. Joseph C. Garza

    MET 051512 WABASH MUSSEL.jpg

  • Documenting riverlife: Jane Morse, a member of the Nature Conservancy, takes a photo of mussel shells she found along the Wabash River Tuesday with the Conservancy's Gretchen Benjamin. Joseph C. Garza

    MET 051512 WABASH MORSE.jpg

  • River resident: Gretchen Benjamin, director of the large rivers program for the Nature Conservancy, shows one of the mussels she found in the Wabash River Tuesday to the Conservancy's Chuck Adams, senior donor relations manager. Joseph C. Garza

    MET 051512 WABASH 2MUSSEL.jpg

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May 20, 2012

Mussel Up: Official looks for presence of mussels as indicator of river’s health

Howard Greninger The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — The roar of an air boat’s engine is muffled only by ear coverings as Joe Hoopingarner steers his watercraft along at 35 miles per hour on a sunny afternoon.

The boat travels Indiana’s river.

The river’s watershed provides drinking water to 72 percent of Hoosier counties, including Vigo County, where the Wabash River separates Terre Haute and West Terre Haute. Native Americans called the river “waapaahsiiki,” which means “it shines white,” or “water over white stones.”

Soil erosion and farm chemicals, as well as localized pollution along the nearly 500-mile river have dulled that shine, according to a river assessment study from The Nature Conservancy.

The boat stops about 12 miles up river from Terre Haute, about half way to Clinton. It’s near two islands, which use to be one island until about a decade ago, Hoopingarner said.

“The river, from flooding and extraordinary rain events, has created a lot more stream bank erosion, especially in the lower portion of the Wabash River,” said Larry Clemens, assistant state director of the Nature Conservancy in Indiana.

“What I have noticed on the Wabash is as you lose that forested edge to the river, you see so much more stream bank erosion,” he added.

The conservation group earlier this week hired Joe’s Air Boats at Fairbanks Park to get a close-up view of the Wabash River. Willow trees line much of this section of the river. Seeds from cottonwood trees float atop a breeze.

It’s here that Grethen Benjamin, who heads the Nature Conservancy’s large rivers program, stepped out of the boat in search of fresh water mussels. The water is less than 3 feet deep. She discovered a live mussel, a fragile paper shell mussel, which she estimated at 3 years old based on growth rings. She later put the mussel back into the river.

“Fragile paper shells are pretty tolerant of not the best conditions in the world, but to find a live mussel is always a good thing,” Benjamin said. “These river banks used to be covered with them. We want to see more of these. A healthy system would have lots of these.

“A mussel doesn’t’ survive if you don’t have a good fish population,” Benjamin added. Mussels shoot out larvae of baby mussels, called glochidia, that attach to fish. The fish carry that larvae around for a couple of weeks. The mussels then drop off and start their life cycle.

“A mussel is just an indicator that you probably have a pretty good fish population,” she said. In addition, a mussel is a filter feeder, so if there is a lot of toxins or polluted water, they will die, Clemens said.

Clemens divides the river into three sections. Terre Haute rests in the prime area of the river, he said.

The upper third is “pretty impacted by nutrients, but still a high quality river. The middle section, from Terre Haute to Peru/Logansport, from the aspects of the quality of the fish, the diversity of the fish and mussels, it is the really prime area,” Clemens said.

This section is also home to 120 endangered, threatened or rare plants and animals.

The southern section, south of Terre Haute, becomes a different, much larger river as it heads into the Ohio River.

“We have been really interested in the Wabash River for nearly 20 years, but it was not until about seven years ago that we started gaining enough experience and knowledge to really start thinking about something as big as the Wabash,” Clemens said.

A $200,000 grant from the Alcoa Foundation allowed the Nature Conservancy “to pull together some science and do an assessment of the Wabash that could really guide us to … the nice places that we need to invest in.”

In addition, partnering with Indiana’s Healthy Rivers Initiative, the Nature Conservancy received $100,000 from two grants from Duke Energy and $150,000 from Vectren Energy, plus an additional $100,000 from Alcoa, said Chuck Adams, senior donor relations manager.

“We are trying to get the water quality to improve. It is having some degradation from sediments and overloads of nutrients,” Clemens said. “The Wabash is often highlighted as one of the top five contributors of nitrogen and phosphorous to the Ohio River and ultimately the Mississippi River basin.

“Work in the uplands involves the Indiana Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and The Nature Conservancy working to prevent soil erosion,” he said.

The idea is to encourage farmers to use long-term conservation practices such as no-till farming with cover crops, nutrient and pest management, conservation buffers and precision-farming technology.

“Our role often is just as a facilitator. We are working with the USDA and the state on some new technology on the way we design our drainage ditches that can also help clean water while still getting drainage for agricultural land,” Clemens said.

Yet Clemens said the real story of the Wabash is people.

“You have communities like Terre Haute, Lafayette, Logansport and others that are starting to see the river as an asset to their cities and their communities,” he said.

“It used to be probably that people were trying to get away from the river and I think, in the future, people will try to come to the river and enjoy it as we seem to have so few of those places left,” Clemens said.

Conservation efforts at the state and local levels can lead to a recreational corridor through Terre Haute, “that extends from Shades Park and Turkey Run State Park on Sugar Creek down into the Wabash and then all the way south of Terre Haute,” Clemens said.

“It would be an area that citizens of Indiana could enjoy. The boating on the river, the fishing and recreation, hunting and hiking. It could bring a lot of people to this part of the United States when you have those types of natural assets,” Clemens said.

Reporter Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@

tribstar.com.

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