Too little productivity, too much loneliness. It’s such a thing with the aging of society. But apparently the problem not only plagues mankind, but also the freshwater pearl mussel, as the news agency epd reports. The mussel resembles an Easter egg with its thick brown and black shell. Or at least a chocolate sea fruit, as it is often served as a praline in Belgium, although it mainly grows in the border triangle of Bavaria, Saxony and the Czech Republic. One of the world’s oldest organisms, it survived dinosaurs and industrialization, but is now on the verge of extinction.
The freshwater pearl mussels are “like in a hospice,” say conservationists, and the youngest specimens are over 50. The reason apparently lies in the difficult childhood, the mussel babies survive their first winter on trout taxis and then dig themselves into the creek bed for years. This worked for more than 300 million years, but now the young mussels can no longer make it out of the gravel, they suffocate on sediments that are washed from the fields into the streams.
Conservationists have therefore devised an ingenious system for raising the offspring in water basins far away from the stream. They warm up the water and play springtime for the mini mussels, feeding, cleaning and controlling them for years. You can imagine it a little like cuddling with mussels, it takes patience, only when the offspring is big are they released by the human parents into the wild. Here, too, man and shell are alike: cuddles always help.
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