For the four years of my undergraduate degree, I was a division 1 collegiate swimmer. During that time, I practiced 20+ hours per week, competed at swim meets, and did my best to be successful in my academics at San Diego State University. I knew this experience would give me lifelong soft skills that would be useful in my career path such as discipline, time management, and leadership. One skill from swimming that I was sure I would never have to use again was holding my breath for a very long time while doing strenuous activity.

Well, I was wrong! This past week, my coworkers and I journeyed to the San Antonio river to look for freshwater mussel species. It had been raining in the area recently and the river flow was a bit higher than normal. This led to us having to actually dive underwater, with weight belts and goggles, and skim the bottom of the river for mussels. As it turns out, my breath control skills I picked up as a swimmer were extremely applicable to this activity. We had a successful haul that day and brought many imperiled mussel species back to Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery.

My project this summer involves the conservation of these little known but very interesting shellfish. Raising mussels is a bit complicated. During the first stage of their life cycle, they are parasitic organisms called glochidia that infest host fish gills for a couple weeks before they drop off and begin their life as harmless filter feeders in river sediment. Many mussel species have minnow-like lures that stick out of their shell to attract fish when they are ready to infest a host with their glochidia. Once a fish falls for the bait, the mussel releases their hundreds of thousands of glochidia into the water which clamp onto the host’s gills. Our goal at the hatchery is to manually replicate this process, but in order to do this we had to find fertilized female mussels with viable glochidia in the San Antonio river. At the hatchery, we extract glochidia from the female mussels and pipette them into the fish mouth to get the glochidia to attach to the gills (as shown in picture). After a couple weeks on the fish gills, the glochidia transform into tiny juvenile mussels and drop off into our filter bags, where we collect them and place them in our mussel aquaculture system.

Prior to this experience, I had never worked with mussels and had no idea how complicated rearing them would be. Taking the lead on our conservation project has been a challenge, but it has taught me many problem solving skills, and I even got to learn how to do some plumbing to create the aquaculture system. I am sure I will take these problem solving skills with me after this internship, even if the problems I am solving do not directly relate to mussels. But who knows, maybe my highly specific mussel rearing knowledge will be very useful to me one day, just like my breath holding skills were.

Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Program: Directorate Fellows Program

Location: Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery