Oct 4, 2014 4 min read

WILLIAMSTOWN, W.Va. — Visiting the lesser-known half of the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge requires dressing in appropriate attire for the occasion: scuba gear.

“The refuge consists of 22 islands and four mainland tracts scattered along 362 miles of river, most of it in West Virginia,” said refuge biologist Patty Morrison. “Altogether, we have about 3,300 acres — half of it underwater.”

To acquaint the public with the wide array of wildlife that lives beneath the surface of the Ohio, the refuge has hosted several “Under the Waves” programs at its visitor center near Williamstown. On Sept. 23, a group of about 35 attended the most recent session, sponsored by the Friends of the Ohio River Islands Wildlife Refuge.

In addition to providing habitat for 105 species of fish ranging from tiny channel darters to 100-pound, plankton-eating paddlefish, the refuge is home to 45 species of freshwater mussels, including seven on the federal endangered species list, Morrison said. By the time the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge was formed in 1990, seven Ohio River mussel species had disappeared from the refuge’s section of the river but could be found elsewhere in the U.S. Four other former resident species had gone extinct globally.

Formation of the wildlife refuge saved the islands from sand and gravel dredging, a prime killer of mussels and their habitat, but failed to shield them from human-caused challenges. A 1999 chemical spill from a Marietta, Ohio, chemical plant killed an estimated 1 million mussels on a 13-mile section of the Ohio, and a 2005 barge accident at Belleville Locks jammed floodgates and caused a section of the river to go dry. “We lost the pool and millions of mussels froze to death,” Morrison said.

While Ohio River mussels appear to be on the road to recovery in the wake of the chemical spill and the barge mishap, they remain vulnerable to similar accidents in the future. Currently, 76 of the nearly 300 species of mussels known to exist in the U.S. are on the endangered species list.

In 2010, in an effort to boost the populations of mussels by establishing and connecting new colonies of them in their former range, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and West Virginia DNR began bringing the bivalves back to sites where they once flourished. Mussels were collected from under a bridge over the Allegheny River near East Brady, Pennsylvania, that was scheduled for demolition, held in a quarantine facility, and transplanted in West Virginia waters at several locations along the Ohio, as well as sites on the Elk, Little Kanawha, Kanawha River at Kanawha Falls, and Middle Island and Dunkard creeks.

More recently, the focus has been on re-establishing rarer species, made possible by another Pennsylvania bridge over the Allegheny — this one at East Brady — being scheduled for in-stream demolition. “The two most common species at the Hunter Station Bridge are federally endangered, which has spurred the work on conducting restoration with them. If we can get viable populations established, that’s the first step in being able to get them off the endangered species list.”

Earlier this month, Morrison, Clayton and other biologists with the Fish and Wildlife Service and DNR donned scuba gear and placed rare Pennsylvania mussels at three sites on the Ohio, as well as sites on the Kanawha and Elk rivers.

Barring unforeseen issues with the Pennsylvania mussels adapting to their new West Virginia home, 5,000 to 10,000 mussels will be translocated each year from the Hunter Station Bridge to West Virginia rivers and streams in 2015 and 2016.

“We’re trying to create seed populations that we hope will spread from where we put them,” Morrison said. “They just need a little help to get things going.”

“A lot of people ask, ‘why should we care about mussels?”‘ Morrison said during her “Life Under the Waves” presentation. “For one thing, they provide food for turtles, muskrats and otters. For another, they keep our water clean. A mussel filters 1.25 gallons of water an hour. A mile-long mussel bed is capable of filtering 4 billion gallons of water a day.”