Mussel Magic You Won’t Believe – Georgia Wildlife Blog

Freshwater mussels are amazing magicians.

Not convinced? Watch the video below. What you’ll see is a finelined pocketbook mussel in northwest Georgia’s Holly Creek using the fleshy tissue in its shell to mimic a wounded fish. Likely a blackbanded darter. Bands, eye spots and all.

This trick is all about survival. The finelined pocketbook is a rare mussel that depends on bass to carry and disperse its young. Bass, of course, eat darters and other small animals.

But when a bass bites this darter lure, the mussel – maybe with a quiet Tada! – spews out its young. Some of these mini mussels, called glochidia and each smaller than a grain of salt, clamp onto the fish’s gill filaments. There, they grow for a few weeks, then drop off in a different part of the stream to hopefully further the family line.

DNR malacologist Matthew Rowe said the federally threatened finelined pocketbook is one of the Lampsilini mussels. The group is known for using “showy mantle lures” (mantle is the tissue lining a mussel’s shell) to attract predatory fish which then end up hosting mussel glochidia.

Finelined pocketbook mussels can also release their eggs in mucusy strands. Waving in stream currents, the sticky strings tempt fish to bite … and get slimed with mussel larvae.

For creatures that move no faster than a crawl and don’t rate high in animal IQ, the creativity and sleight-of-shell abilities some mussels show is nothing short of magical.

The video was taken during annual mussel sampling focused on a section of Holly Creek where organizations and landowners have worked to restore streambanks and keep cattle out of the creek. Partners include The Nature Conservancy, Limestone Valley Resource Conservation and Development Council, Coosa River Basin Initiative, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.