Patty Loew:
Farm runoff, stormwater and other pollutants are putting rare mussels at risk in Wisconsin waters. Every summer Matt Berg and his students from Grantsburg High School travel to the headwaters of the St. Croix River. They literally submerge themselves in research on the health of freshwater mussels. “In Wisconsin” reporter Liz Koerner shows you their research in Douglas County.

Matt Berg:
I had never done research before. I thought how neat would it be to be to do something real with high school kids. That gets kids excited and keeps them coming back.

Matt Berg:
You want to make sure you look for any mussels you see. Pick them up, set them in your bucket and scoop as best you can, trying not to lose any sediment, and put that in the bucket.

Matt Berg:
One of the reasons it's so neat is it shows the kids that the river is more than just fish and water.  

Matt Berg:
They are two apart.

Lydia Berge Briggs:
Mr. Berg is a good teacher. He’s really involved and it feels like you’re actually making a difference. It feels like you’re doing something right.

Matt Berg:
What we are doing at site is excavating the bottom of the river with scoops and putting them in buckets. The reason they are doing that is it gives them a way to quantify what the density is.

Gavin Meyer:
All you see is the sediment in front of you. You feel with your hand and then you can tell if it’s a mussel and pull it up to your face. I’ve found a few.

Matt Berg:
You are looking for baseline data that ultimately will show long-term trends. And those that are here, are they reproducing well. So we can come back in the future and see how are they doing?

Nicole Davis:
This one is dead. Usually there will be a tongue in here. It's just one big muscle, that’s all a mussel is made of. Right now this one is all decayed so there is nothing left in here. It usually attaches right about here. When they are alive they will be down in the water and they will open up just a little bit and stick their tongues out and suck the passing particles through their filter feeders. So that’s how mussels feed.

Matt Berg:
Sometimes you find a population that’s all old shells. They look like they are healthy, but adults are living, they are just not reproducing. Either the fish are gone or the young which are really susceptible to ammonia, fertilizer runoff, are not able to survive.

Kevin Johnson:
I am recording all the mussel data including sediment. Okay, we have got 16.25.

Kevin Johnson:
Also we are recording all dead and live mussel species we find. Then we are recording the data of the live species and can do the analysis to see just how this area compares to other areas. I think it's fun that we are doing this research and doing what we can.

Matt Berg:
Look at this. Wow! It’s an elk-toe. This is a pretty rare species. It's one of our prettiest mussels. You can see the germinal shell when it fell off the fish was only that big. The first year they are that big. The second year they are still only that big. This is just a 4-year-old individual.

Matt Berg:
The rare ones get special treatment. The endangered species we hand-place back in the substrate right where we found them. It's challenging to tell them apart. It takes practice. This is a giant floater. It’s brown, they tend to get really big. Some of the big ones -- some of our biggest species. We have three ridges, and they are aptly named. Those are easy ones to learn. What else do we have? These are pocketbooks, they have an impressive, big shell. They’re really heavy, too.

Kevin Johnson:
We haven't found even found a monkey-face or the pimple-back yet.

Matt Berg:
We have a nice size range. We have young ones, the medium size and the adult ones. The population is all represented here. That tells us that the river here is incredibly healthy and there is great bio-diversity here.

Matt Berg:
I love working with high schoolers. They are great kids it's fun to see their enthusiasm and excitement.

Matt Berg:
Most of these kids are not gonna go on to be biologists. They are going to go on to be citizens doing any number of things. But I hope that this experience is giving them environmental awareness they would not have gotten another way. And that makes it meaningful and fun.

Patty Loew:
There are about 40 species of native mussels in the St. Croix River system. Some on the verge of extinction. Berg plans to resurvey this spot in 5-10 years. His research results are given to the National Park Service to help with its management decisions.