Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Six of
Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski: Welcome back. Today we're wrapping up our
sixth season with a very special episode. With the help of guest
producer Caitlin Kennedy, we're taking you to the Emerald Isle
of Ireland, and meeting an easily overlooked creature that
holds the history of a nation within its shell. From the rise
and collapse of heavy industry to a bloody civil war, the
riverbeds of Ireland have been witness, and they tell a story
of change and possibility stretching far beyond any human
lifetime. From Future Ecologies, this is Mussel Memory.
Introduction Voiceover: Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape
of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
Frank Mitchell: So these are all the things you need whenever you
have a team going out with you, and one of the most important
things is your life jacket. Let's go on an adventure.
Caitlin Kennedy: Who lives in a river? Do you know? I certainly
didn't. I've explored the coastline, looking for starfish
and crabs in rock pools, but I'd never really perused a riverbed.
That's all about to change.
Frank Mitchell: Just watch your step. You wouldn't drop into a
hole or something.
Caitlin Kennedy: We're in the Ireland of legend, green mossy
boulders tumbling down into a fast flowing river full of
tentacle-like ranunculus, which provides endless hiding places
for aquatic species. My guide, Frank Mitchell, and I are
wearing our life jackets, yes, but also waders up to our
chests. As we pick our way down the banks, I imagine diving down
and swimming amongst the very creatures we're looking for.
Frank Mitchell: If you come up here here, and it's not easy for
you to see them, and they're all in there. And if you come on
over here.
Caitlin Kennedy: Frank passes me the bathyscope, a traffic
cone-shaped instrument with a perspex pane for peering down to
the riverbed. When my eyes adjust to the shadow cutting
through the surface of the water, there they are —
freshwater pearl mussels!
Wow! There's loads of them!
Frank Mitchell: See them in there?
Caitlin Kennedy: Oh yeah!
Frank Mitchell: You see them underneath the bark of the tree?
Caitlin Kennedy: Until recently, I had been oblivious to the
existence of any river mussels, but in 2021 I came to the
Ballinderry River, which wends its way through the rolling
hills of County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. I discovered a
species whose existence was so very different to my human life,
I became a little obsessed. Their lives are fascinating, a
paradox of stillness and flux. But more than anything, I wanted
to understand why they're struggling to survive in the
rocky streams of Ireland. Frank's life, like those of the
creatures he cares for, is deeply entwined with the
Ballinderry River. Here he is responsible for the longest
Frank Mitchell: And I've been here now for the last 30 years.
running freshwater pearl mussel breeding program in the world.
Caitlin Kennedy: Frank spent his youth fishing the Ballinderry's
dappled banks and building weirs out of sticks near its source.
Frank Mitchell: I was born and raised on the Ballinderry River.
Caitlin Kennedy: But he never imagined he'd now be working to
save another creature that calls the river home, or that it would
be the longest-lived creature anywhere in the UK and Ireland.
In the time it's taken Frank's hair to turn white, the oldest
mussels in his care have grown from less than a millimeter to
the length of his hand, and they'll continue growing for
some time yet.
Frank Mitchell: And I never realized that I would be
actually working on such an interesting and important
project with the freshwater pearl mussels.
Caitlin Kennedy: Every day for the past three decades, Frank
has arrived at work in his overall and wellies, and
traversed a bridge over the river. When he opens the door to
an abandoned-looking building, he sees the familiar rows of
long white ceramic tanks that form a series of water channels
through which the Ballinderry River is diverted.
Frank Mitchell: We're walking in our breeding center where the
river's coming through naturally. So, we have to keep
this clean, so that the mussels that are dropping off here get
every good chance of surviving in the gravel.
Caitlin Kennedy: Frank reaches down into one of the makeshift
riverbeds and stirs some recently settled sediment back
into the flow of the river.
Frank Mitchell: And all I'm doing here is just moving the
silt off the gravel, trying to keep it clean. So, if you get a
look in here, you see all those mussels there.
Caitlin Kennedy: To my untrained eye, what Frank has pulled out
of the water looks like a pebble. In their native habitat
of rocky streams, it can be hard to discern them, but these are
freshwater pearl mussels. When I say mussel, you might be
imagining a small blue-black sea mussel, but these mussel shells
are rounder and a matte dark brown color. They're much bigger
than sea mussels, and don't latch onto any rocks, just lie
burrowed in the riverbed, making them pretty hard to spot. You
might see these frilly, pale fronds poking out of the shells
when they're feeding. These are the mussel siphons, sort of an
in tube and an out tube. One siphon inhales the water from
which they'll extract the food they need, and the other
releases water and any waste. At that level, not so different
from us... except that in a mussel, they both emerge in the
same place. And the same pipes that are used for eating are
also used for breathing... and getting rid of waste... and
reproducing.
Oh, and did I mention that freshwater pearl mussels live
for 150 years? Some of the oldest animals on the planet are
in fact mollusks, like the record-breaking black Quahog
clam, who live for up to 500 years. Our Irish pearl mussels
might not hold the title, but they're still seriously
long-lived, especially for their size. It's mind-blowing to think
that there are mussels alive today who were born before the
Titanic set sail.
Frank Mitchell: I remember seeing me first mussels when I
was a young cub fishing along the river. I didn't know an
awful lot about them. It's no real big deal to me, but when
you start to work with them, and you start to learn about them,
and how important they are, and then you go to a mussel site.
The first muscle site I went to, a real good one, was away down
in Donegal and Galway. And when I come across these big mussel
sites, it's mind blowing.
Caitlin Kennedy: This dense population of mussels in a bend
of the river might be a rarity now, but it would have been a
commonplace sight to Frank's grandfather. By the 2010s, the
mussel population in the Ballindery had crashed by 90% in
little more than a human generation.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: I think you would find some
freshwater pearl mussels in most rivers in Ireland, at one point.
Caitlin Kennedy: I drove the length of Ireland to meet Dr.
Mary Catherine Gallagher, an aquatic ecologist who worked on
a freshwater pearl mussel restoration project in County
Kerry. It's a rugged coastal region carved up by Atlantic sea
lochs in the southwest corner of the island.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: They're present in Europe and also
globally. So, they're a worldwide species. On a global
level, they're classified as being endangered, but then on an
Irish and European level, they're critically endangered.
Caitlin Kennedy: In Ireland, populations are clinging on down
the west coast, particularly those rocky, hilly places that
are harder to farm intensively or build houses on —
Mary Catherine Gallagher: from Donegal all the way down to
Cork,
Caitlin Kennedy: but the reason scientists like Mary Catherine
have been working with freshwater pearl mussels isn't
just because they're endangered. Freshwater pearl mussels are
sometimes referred to as an umbrella species. If you make
conditions right for them, everyone else in their vicinity
benefits, including humans.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: They will filter about 50 liters of
water a day, that's what an adult mussel can do. So, I've
seen it written, like, you know, the amount of water for a bath,
which is an awful lot. And they're filtering it, and
obviously they're doing that, so they can get food, but that
action also has a cleaning effect on the water. They also
can remove pathogens that are harmful to human health as well.
Caitlin Kennedy: And as they filter all matter flowing
through the river, sometimes it can give rise to the very thing
that gives these mussels their name.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: Some mussels can contain a pearl.
Caitlin Kennedy: Some, but not many. Pearls aren't a standard
part of the mussel's biology, they're an accidental defense
mechanism. So, despite their name, you're actually only
likely to find a pearl inside one in 7000 mussels. Filter
feeding mollusks have evolved to prevent large debris from
getting trapped inside their shell and irritating the outer
layers of their bodies. If something does get trapped, the
mussel has an ingenious strategy. It secretes the same
substance which lines their shell gradually coating the
object until smooth and rounded.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: It's usually some sort of like a bit
of sand or some sort of fragment that's like foreign to the
mussel, but it's actually almost like an immunological response.
Caitlin Kennedy: Almost like us producing eye goo.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: Yes, exactly, but a lot more
beautiful.
Caitlin Kennedy: This substance is called nacre, or more
commonly mother of pearl, and it catches light with a kind of
muted glow of colors. At the microscopic level, highly
ordered hexagonal bricks of calcium carbonate tessellate and
form layers. When visible light enters, some wavelengths are
trapped, whilst others scatter, creating a pearlescent effect.
Unfortunately, this has brought the mussels a lot of unwanted
attention. Throughout recorded history, pearl fishers have
scooped these vulnerable mollusks out of river beds,
opening them up in search of treasure.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: And because not every mussel
contains a pearl, that could mean hundreds of mussels being
taken out of the river, opened up, and if they didn't have a
pearl, just being like discarded on the river bank. That's
obviously an illegal practice in Ireland now as well.
Caitlin Kennedy: Even when a mussel lacks its eponymous
pearl, the inside of its shell is entrancing to look at. Some
shell interiors have gold streaks from iron-rich waters,
some are more pink or blue, depending on the metals nearby.
Nacre is a bit of a super substance, being stronger than
steel and less brittle than the limestone from which it's made.
Material scientists have long tried to replicate nacre's
impressive ability to stop cracks from forming in their
tracks, a feat achieved by the perfect alchemy of hard calcium
carbonate bricks and soft silk like proteins, which hold the
layers together. Mussels can even use nacre to glue
themselves back together again. If their shells get a little
worn, they will simply lay down more layers of nacre, gradually
repairing the damage from the inside out. And yet, living
muscles never intentionally display this mystical-looking
substance to the outside world. What Mary Catherine sees when
conducting surveys is two matte black shells kept almost
completely shut, but as an ecologist, she's come to
appreciate them for far more than their shiny nacre.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: You'll see the shells, and then you'll
see the openings for the siphons, but they're really
beautiful, like especially the inhaling siphon. It has these
like frilly edges, I think it depends on the situation, or on
the lighting, maybe, but sometimes it's kind of a grayish
color, sometimes it's more of like maybe a light pinky kind of
color, and that's all you'll see usually, and then inside it's
just like, yeah, as like a soft-bodied gloopy organism.
Caitlin Kennedy: And what does a gloopy organism encased in a
shell need to live its best life?
Mary Catherine Gallagher: They like really clean water. They
like high oxygen levels. They like what's called this
Goldilocks flow, so it's kind of like not too fast, not too slow,
a very in the middle kind of flow rate in the river. In terms
of the substrate, or like the river bottom, they like a kind
of a diversity, really. They like some kind of bigger rocks
and boulders, and then some smaller sediments as well. It's
nice if the river has little riffles in it, so areas that are
really nice and well oxygenated. It can be nice if the catchment
has, like, a lake higher up, so that can kind of help to
stabilize the flow of water. Low levels of nutrients, they don't
like, you know, eutrophic waters. Basically clean, medium
level of flow, nice diversity in the riverbed, good levels of
oxygen.
Caitlin Kennedy: ...and fish?
Mary Catherine Gallagher: And fish! Of course! The fish are
really important. I always forget about the fish, I'm so
focused on the mussels. But obviously you have no mussels
without fish.
Caitlin Kennedy: This is the bit about freshwater pearl mussels
that completely captivated me when I first learned about them,
because the beginning of their life is just so wildly different
to the rest of their very long, very sedentary years. See, a
freshwater pearl mussel larva cannot survive without latching
on to the gills of a fish.
Frank Mitchell: Just checking on me fish to see how they're
doing. They're doing okay. I'm just going to lift out a fish
here, and I'm just going to take a look at the gills of the fish,
just to see if there's any mussels on them, or they're
starting to drop off. This, by the way, doesn't do the fish any
harm, okay. You're not going to see much. It's very hard to see
them, but there's a few wee white specks there.
Caitlin Kennedy: As Frank gently pulls back the little trout's
gill cover, I get a glimpse of the white spots he's describing.
Really, it just looks like the fish has some goo stuck on its
gills, but each globule contains 1000s of larvae, and under a
microscope each one looks like
Mary Catherine Gallagher: Like a miniature mussel, like a teeny
tiny mussel.
Caitlin Kennedy: These are the lucky few, the ones who beat the
clock, because baby mussels, or glochidia, to use their
scientific name, have just 24 hours to latch onto the gills of
a salmon or trout. After that, they perish. At this stage,
they're extremely small, about a third of the size of a grain of
sand.
Unknown: And they're tiny, but they are able to sense when a
fish is nearby. So, a salmon or a trout in Ireland are the two
species that they like to attach onto. They're basically kind of
like floating around in the water. When they sense that a
salmon or trout is nearby, they actually start opening and
closing their shells, so it's called snapping. And if they are
lucky enough to be inhaled by the fish and then pass over the
gills, and if they happen to snap at the right moment and
grab onto the gills, they can stay there for nine months, and
they go everywhere the fish goes.
Caitlin Kennedy: For quite a long time, I couldn't understand
why evolution had resulted in such a perilous obstacle course
for the baby mussels, but the more I spoke to Frank and Mary
Katherine, the more it made sense. Newly hatched microscopic
mussels are at huge risk of predation, so their fish host
becomes their mobile shelter. But more crucially, if
freshwater pearl mussels dispersed their young just
through the water, each population would be washed
further and further downstream and quickly into the sort of
slow sediment-laden water, they can't tolerate. When they drop
off the gills after nine months, the chances are they'll be
roughly in the same place they started, or even a bit further
upstream.
This is actually quite a common reproduction strategy in river
mussels, and some are much more aggressive about it. In the US,
pocketbook mussels have evolved a natural lure that looks just
like a tiny fish. An adult pocketbook will bait an
unsuspecting predator near its open shell and then clamp shut,
trapping the fish for up to an hour, whilst it blasts the gills
with larvae. Our Irish pearl mussels are tame in comparison,
Ecologists have battled whether to call this relationship
parasitic or symbiotic. It is clear that having mussel larvae
attached to your gills does give you a bit of a disadvantage, so
infected fish end up smaller than uninfected fish, but in
cleaning the river, it's also likely that the mussels create
an ideal habitat for fish spawning.
Newly educated, I reckoned it was time to try and find some
mussels by myself.
I'm looking for pearl mussels in this river in Kerry...
A word on looking for mussels, you actually have to have a
license from the National Parks and Wildlife Service to do what
I'm doing, because of how endangered these mollusks are.
Swimming or fishing, fine-ish — there are some pretty mad laws
here about riverbed ownership. But these mussels' habitats are
super fragile right now, so please don't go grabbing your
nearest bathyscope without a licensed professional.
Oh! Hello, Blackbird. ...But it's quite tricky here because
the rocks are very dark, so they hide the muscles very well, so
I'm just looking for signs of them, like a siphon. Definitely
no mussels there. Oh, there's some very rapidly moving trout.
God, they've got places to go. From what Mary Catherine and
Frank said, they like a kind of dappled space, so I'm looking
under trees, and it's tricky, because whilst I want to get
close, I don't want to drop my audio recorder in. There's
definitely a lot of trout and waterboatmen, but not a lot of
mussels.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: Yeah, they were at one point really
widespread and really numerous. Their range in general over the
past few reporting cycles isn't really contracting much, so they
can still be quite widespread, but it's the numbers in the
populations that are really declining. So we have a lot of
kind of like little remnant populations or populations that
are sort of functionally extinct, so there's adults there
but they're not managing to reproduce successfully, and
there's no juvenile recruitment.
Caitlin Kennedy: To make sense of this drastic decline, we need
to emerge from the surface of the stream and look around at
the Ireland visible before us. From this vantage point, we see
that the bank has been completely cleared on one side,
giving an open view of a field of cows, some ambling down the
bank to drink directly from the river. Beyond the field are the
Laggan hills, almost entirely bare, except for three perfect
rectangles of monoculture pine plantation. The river, too, has
artificially straight lines where it's been channeled. On
the other bank, through the boughs of a few small trees, a
tractor spreads herbicide on the marshy land, getting rid of the
rushes for a field of grazing sheep. My dad grew up in
Ireland, so we visited every year. He and I both agreed this
view is far from unusual, and it's not just visually a tidied
landscape. London's Natural History Museum created a
biodiversity intactness index to measure ecosystem health. The
index has since been adopted by the United Nations to tell which
countries are most nature depleted. Out of 240 countries
on the index, Northern Ireland ranks 13th... from the bottom.
The Republic of Ireland ranks only one place above. How did
this happen? How did this island come to be so desperately nature
depleted? When Frank was growing up in the 1950s, things actually
looked pretty different
Frank Mitchell: To me, those were good days, and the river
always seemed healthy and doing well. Spent a lot of me time
playing, fishing. Those days you didn't have money to buy a
fishing rod or nothing.
Caitlin Kennedy: So older fishermen would give young Frank
some bait to tie to his hazel stick, and that kept him happy.
Although other forms of life, like mussels, were of little
consequence to him.
Frank Mitchell: I remember seeing mussels when I was a cub
out fishing, but I never really paid much attention to it. To
me, it was just a shell.
Caitlin Kennedy: There are few habitat records from the 50s,
but mussels were undoubtedly more numerous than they are now.
Frank Mitchell: In my time, when I'm working with 'em, and I've
been working with 'em around 30 years, their profile has lifted
well up from the 50s and 60s, where they really weren't
protected. Like, I mean, they still had men coming out,
poaching, looking for these pearls.
Caitlin Kennedy: Those men would sit in glass-bottomed boats to
search the riverbed for telltale frilly siphons. From there, they
could easily reach in and scoop the large shells out, crack them
open, and hope for a pearl. And for every pearl they'd find, at
least 5000 mussels would pay with their lives. But despite
Frank's early love of the outdoors, he couldn't have
imagined working in nature protection. It just wasn't a job
in those days. People in the 50s and 60s still thought of nature
as a bottomless resource. Besides, Frank had a humble
start in life.
Frank Mitchell: I never had any real big desire to be anything
special, you know. My role in life was, because I had no
qualification, was to just get a job, keep out of trouble, keep
busy.
Caitlin Kennedy: At age 15, Frank got a job in the local
textiles factory, an incredibly common trajectory for young boys
and girls of that era. Everyone in Northern Ireland knows
someone who worked in textiles.
Frank Mitchell: I mean, I remember making lovely fancy
silk shirts, silk clothes. Bell bottoms was a big thing in my
time here. You'd have loved it!
Caitlin Kennedy: It's true. Frank and I both have a passion
for flashy shirt and snazzy trousers. But the era of
opportunity couldn't last forever, and though Frank tried
to avoid it, trouble was on the horizon for people and mussels.
Mendel Skulski: We'll pick up this thread when we come back —
after the break.
And we're back. I'm Mendel. This is Future Ecologies. And on
today's show, producer Caitlin Kennedy is tracing the modern
arc of Northern Ireland through the story of the freshwater
pearl mussel.
Caitlin Kennedy: It's the 70s. Frank is living out his snappily
dressed youth in the textile factory, having put aside his
love for the river for now. But as we're about to discover, its
health will become central to his story and that of Ireland's
freshwater pearl mussels.
Textiles, rivers, and the people that work the land are so
inextricably linked on the island of Ireland, that the
Dublin Customs House building, built in the 1780s, features a
weathered figure crowned by pearls and wearing a turban of
flax plant. This statue is the spirit of the Bann River, and it
shows two core tenets of the Irish economy at the time — flax
and pearls. This makes sense, because in the 18th and 19th
century, freshwater pearl mussels were prevalent. They
would have been in most Irish rivers and streams in the rocky,
fast-flowing upper sections. As evidence, we can find their
namesake pearls in folk stories and mythology from across the
island. To understand Ireland's past, especially its historic
relationship with land and water, I needed to venture back
to when storytelling reigned supreme. So I drove to Átha Í,
near Dublin, on the east of the island to meet a folklorist by
the name of Stiofán Cullen.
Stiofán Cullen: My name is Stiofán. I am primarily a
storyteller, also a folklorist.
Caitlin Kennedy: Had they been born pre 500 BC, Stiofán would
definitely have held the revered position of celebrated bard.
They're a performer through and through. They're also a firm
believer that the stories told then shouldn't be sugar-coated
to retain relevance in today's world.
Stiofán Cullen: There's a few different aspects to the pearl.
Water in general, rivers, lakes, the sea, wells, they all have
strong association with all aspects of folklore, because
they're a food source, first of all, and they're also dangerous.
You shouldn't go out to the water on certain days or go near
the water on certain days, because the dead will emerge and
drag you down, or the fairies will emerge and drag you down,
because of how common it was for people to drown.
There's a few stories where children have gone out gathering
pearls, and then later will commit some kind of
transgression, and when they speak, they're not able to form
words, all that comes out of their mouth is more pearls.
The oldest legal system in Europe, composed by the native
Irish people. There are laws in there on what we would call
today natural conservation. There are laws on when you can
fell certain trees, how many of each kind of tree you can fell
at a time, and what the penalties for felling them in
the wrong season or at the wrong age would be. There's also
similar laws on overfishing, what you take from the water,
what you take from rivers and the sea. We've had all of this
very extractive agricultural process kind of imposed on us
that we now see as the norm, and an important aspect of
indigeneity is connection to the land and having a kind of
reciprocal relationship with the land.
Caitlin Kennedy: I found it hard to pinpoint when habitat
destruction really started in Ireland. After all, the ancient
Picts, Britons, and Gaels, they were already clearing forests
and draining wetlands well before the Anglo-Saxons arrived.
But the pressure on rivers definitely did ramp up with the
arrival of the English in the 1600s and it accelerated with an
industrial land use that came to be at the core of Northern Irish
identity — linen textile mills. If you read about Ireland before
the republic gained independence, two things leap
out from the annals of history — linen and the famine. Despite
England's pivotal role in both, I was actually never taught
about either at school. In the 1860s, Ireland was hit by a
potato blight that destroyed the staple food of its agricultural
workers, killing more than a million people in one of the
worst famines ever seen in Europe. Many, many more were
forced to emigrate. The British still controlled Ireland in its
entirety, and their brutal policies of denying aid and
forcing export of everything else the country grew really did
increase the death toll. So, the only thing people had to sell
was their land.
Sebastian Graham: A lot of the changes to society happened
after the famine.
Caitlin Kennedy: This is Sebastian Graham, a historian
with Ireland Heritage.
Sebastian Graham: We weren't too badly off up here in Ulster with
the famine, but in other areas those rural areas really
suffered, and that's why these mills are so important for the
rural areas that they kept people from going off to
emigrate. They developed their own community around the place,
and after the famine, you had the rapid industrialisation,
investing in machinery, plenty of workforce, wages were low,
and they could export quite a lot of their produce.
Caitlin Kennedy: Sebastian and I meet at one of the last mills in
Northern Ireland to cease production, closing down in just
2015. Approaching through the woodland that has quickly
encircled the red brick buildings, you can hardly tell
this was a hive of industry, but Sebastian tells me that 180
years ago this mill would have been as loud and bustling as the
cities it provided for.
Sebastian Graham: So we're in Upperlands, which is a historic
mill village just outside Maghera, in County Londonderry.
It was one of these mill villages that sprung up in the
1700s where you could have a job and a mill, you'd have your
terrace house, you would have your school, you'd have
everything real close to you.
Caitlin Kennedy: In a feat of cartography not seen since sea
monsters inhabited the earth, Sebastian has mapped all four
and a half thousand mills across Northern Ireland.
Sebastian Graham: Bloody mills everywhere.
Caitlin Kennedy: As we walk towards the old abandoned mill,
we're surrounded on all sides by woodland that has sprung up in
the past 10 years as nature reclaims the site, populated by
swallows, swifts, and small mammals who've made their homes
in the remnants of the mill.
Sebastian Graham: Isn't that amazing
Caitlin Kennedy: Big old lake!
Sebastian Graham: Big big lake. So, again, like this landscape
looks natural, but it's completely man-made. There were
no lakes here at all, and it was just essentially created to
power the mills.
Caitlin Kennedy: We pause an art deco facade, which must have
been an entrance to the new mill. It's a picture of faded
grandeur with 1929 emblazoned into the masonry. Sebastian told
me that the 1920s marked the peak of linens' desirability,
especially for England's upper class. Think crisp white linen
suits and tennis attire worn on holiday in the French Riviera.
This building would probably have heralded a glamorous age of
mechanized progress, as the mill clothed London's elite. I follow
his gaze to the side of the clock, and spot two flared
sheaths of linen textile, like the tassels on fancy curtains.
Sebastian Graham: I just love these linen swags, you know. You
see that a lot of buildings in Belfast, so cool the way they've
incorporated that here. Yeah, it's like a plaster motif. You
get them in a lot of those '20s, '30s buildings. You know, the
flax flour is actually the symbol for Northern Ireland, but
no one really knows that anymore, because it's the
industry's dead and buried.
Caitlin Kennedy: Later on, a walk, I find the real deal
growing at the edge of a field. Flax is a beautiful plant. It
has a long straight stem and periwinkle blue flowers with
five rounded petals that coalesce round a yellow center,
but according to Sebastian, in contrast to the plant, the
process of manufacturing linen was not pretty at all.
Sebastian Graham: For linen manufacture, you pull it from
the field, and then you put it under water for about 14 days,
and that's the retting process.
Caitlin Kennedy: Retting is a kind of fermentation that
separates the tough, woody exterior of the plant from the
supple, desirable fibers within, but the water left behind...
Sebastian Graham: is the most smelly, horrible stuff.
Scientifically, there's wee bacteria changing the whole
nature of the plant, but unfortunately, a lot of the flax
ponds release that water back into the into the rivers. And
we're not talking one or two farms, we're talking about 70%
of farmers at the time in the 1800s doing it.
Caitlin Kennedy: This deoxygenated, alcohol-rich
slough spelled disaster for river dwellers. The pearl
mussels filtering this toxic liquid would have struggled, but
so would the fish they depend on for reproduction.
Sebastian Graham: Because of the fact that it's deoxygenated,
that'll just kill everything out for miles downstream. The
bleaching of linen would have also had a detrimental impact
too.
Caitlin Kennedy: As linen supply and demand ballooned, the
pressure on rivers increased. And although drinking water was
affected as well, and measures were brought in to prevent the
worst toxic releases, little was done to enforce them. Then came
two world wars, and linen was needed for everything —
parachutes, cords, uniforms, bags, you name it. It contained
linen,
Sebastian Graham: I think Churchill stated about, without
linen, there would have been no victory. Even the king and
queen, they had part of their land in Sandringham, dedicated
to flax growing, because it was needed in massive quantities for
just everything you can think of, really.
Caitlin Kennedy: The war might have been one on linen, but it
would also be its downfall. Huge technological leaps brought in
the age of plastic.
Archival Radio: Sometimes I think you love nylon better than
you do me.
The two loves of my life,
In style, they're a classic, but they're made of the latest thing
— woven texturized polyester.
To look neat in the fall, look for Dacron on the label, because
Dacron is a man's best friend. A man looks so smart in suits that
are able to stay wrinkle-free and neat, in winter cold and
winter sleet. A man's at his best when he looks well dressed,
wearing suits that have Dacron in the blend. And the colors and
styling will sure keep him smiling. Dacron is a man's best
friend. Thanks to Decron, by DuPont!
Caitlin Kennedy: So, by the time Frank was 15 and off to work.
Textile manufacturing was still the main source of employment,
but increasingly the factories were working with rayon, nylon,
and polyester. But though linen bleaching and retting was in
decline across these lands, the creatures of the river were far
from safe. After the war, Britain and Ireland went into
agricultural overdrive. The pressure was on to rebuild and
regrow. The post-war farming intensification was actually
going to be the mussels' biggest threat yet.
I feel like Ireland today is a microcosm of what has gone wrong
with our relationship with the land. Overly intensive
agriculture and forestry have put productivity over planetary
capabilities in so many parts of the world. There's a disconnect
between people, intact habitats, and the cultural knowledge which
once tied us all together. It can make it quite hard to trace
the origins of ecological harms, so when I asked Mary Catherine
what has impacted the mussels most, I was actually surprised
to hear that the biggest problem they face aren't the usual river
pollution culprits of chemicals and excess nutrients, although
these definitely don't help, it's sediment from soil erosion.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: Yeah, so there's like a bunch of
different reasons you might have livestock entering a river, and
that activity, and like the trampling within the river, will
cause sedimentation. Then there are things that are happening on
the land, so for example, if you have too many animals stocked in
a field, they're going to over graze, they're going to create
poaching and areas of bare soil, and then when you have periods
of rainfall, that sediment is just going to flow into the
river.
Caitlin Kennedy: In other words, the very thing mussels need to
filter feed is killing them, because there's just so much of
it in rivers. Adults are hardier, they can generally
survive and expel a lot more sediment, but the fragile young
mussels, they're essentially suffocated by over
sedimentation.
Mary Catherine Gallagher: We have problems as well with river
bank management, so you know these lovely, beautiful, like
riparian zones that you get along a natural river that
hasn't been disturbed or altered. We often lose them when
we start to use land for other things. You know, of course, as
a farmer who's trying to make money off of your land, you want
to maximize the amount of area, and so often these buffer zones,
or riparian zones, can kind of get smaller and smaller and
smaller, or maybe sometimes not exist anymore at all. And that's
a problem, because obviously all this lovely vegetation along the
riverbank is like a natural buffer, and so even if there was
sediment running off the land, it would get intercepted at that
point, and not as much of it would end up in the river.
Caitlin Kennedy: Replanting riverbanks with a buffer zone of
plants is often the first line of defense in river restoration,
and it works really well. But it will only ever be a band aid
without less intensive agriculture and forestry
practices, ideally that are timed to the rhythm of the rain.
If you're thinking this sounds like a gloomy outlook or a
never-ending list of implausible conservation demands, you're
right. Things weren't great for organisms that called the Irish
rivers home. They're still not! But for the Ballinderry pearl
mussels, hope came from an unexpected place — the aftermath
of a war.
Ireland might be known for its rolling hills, welcoming pubs,
and a certain joviality known as the crack, but there's a darker
side to Irish history. The potato famine, of course, looms
large, so too do The Troubles, which sowed deep seeds of
division that still exist today. And if habitat restoration
seemed unlikely in the '70s and '80s, peace felt an even more
distant prospect. I know I'm not the first to point out that The
Troubles is kind of a diminishing term for what was in
fact a civil war, replete with checkpoints and bombs and
paramilitaries. This bloody conflict between Catholics and
Protestants was fought not only on religious grounds but also
national identity. The Unionists, who were largely
Protestant, wanted to stay part of the United Kingdom, whilst
the Republicans, largely Catholic, wanted the North to
rejoin the South as a fully independent Ireland. The
troubles have been simmering ever since the Republic had
gained independence in 1921 but by the '80s and '90s things
turned really ugly. Around 3500 people lost their lives in
bombings, fires, attacks, and reprisal killings, and even
people like Frank, a hippie at heart with no interest in
stoking the fire, couldn't help getting caught up in the heat.
Frank Mitchell: In all my time, I never really taken any one
side of anything, because I'm kind of neutral in all these
things.
Caitlin Kennedy: But because the textile industry was still so
dominant at the time, it was inevitable that this
all-pervasive social conflict bled onto the factory floor.
Frank Mitchell: Tit for tat, so when you're walking on the
factory with three or four hundred people, whenever
something happened, you could have felt the tension... because
as far as they were concerned, I was surely involved, because I
was other side of the house. You didn't know when things gonna
break out and get worse. The younger generation don't know
about these things, and they don't want them to know about
it.
Caitlin Kennedy: But in the early '90s, amidst all this
distrust and violence, an unlikely alliance formed between
Protestant and Catholic anglers. Both were starting to get
worried about the state of the Ballinderry River,
Frank Mitchell: The Ballinderry was one of the best fishing
rivers in probably the whole of Ireland. And then it started to
decline, the number of fish started to fall back.
Caitlin Kennedy: When I first came to Ballinderry, I had no
idea that the freshwater pearl mussel breeding program actually
came into being because of The Troubles. A community whose
bonds had been pushed to breaking point came together for
the sake of the river.
Frank Mitchell: It was very much based on the two sides of
community working together and we are always open for anyone to
come from our breeding center to our river school, and it doesn't
matter where you're from, who you are, what colour you are, or
what races you are, anyone at all.
Caitlin Kennedy: Frank told me those inspiring anglers worked
together to access peace and reconciliation funds from the
EU, and they carved out a long-term vision of connection
to nature in a very building where our story started — the
mussel nursery. Initially constructed as a fish hatchery,
it was soon dedicated to repopulating the river with
mussels and studying their long and convoluted lives. To hear
Frank and his team advocating for these beings is to hear the
healing of old wounds between Protestants and Catholics,
humans and the land.
Frank Mitchell: They're one of them species that can't speak
for themselves, so I feel that working with them and have an
opportunity to talk about them and raise their profile in any
way at all that will help them, well then I'm privileged to be
doing it.
Caitlin Kennedy: The Ballinderry Rivers Trust continues to
protect the river. They bring in people of all ages to connect
with these species, and they stay true to their
reconciliation roots. Before Frank and I ventured out to see
mussels in the wild, he had just finished a school tour with
students from a Catholic, a Protestant, and an integrated
school all at the same time. It's how they always work.
Frank Mitchell: That is something I find... when they do
that, it's things that will stay in their mind, and they have
that entrant there. When you see the children going through the
breeding center, and seeing these things and shouting,
getting excited... it's wonderful.
Caitlin Kennedy: I'm left wondering whether maybe, just
maybe, freshwater pearl mussels and the people who protect them
can show us a more stable, long-term vision of nature
restoration — One where we get better at putting aside
differences in beliefs for the sake of species on the brink. If
Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics can come together for
the sake of the river's health straight after the most
turbulent and violent period in their region's history, then
there's a lot more hope out there than the news would have
us believe.
Frank and the team at Ballinderry, they're not engaged
in attention-grabbing conservation. Their goals can't
be achieved within an election cycle, because that's just never
going to work for an ultra long-lived species like the
mussels. What he showed me was a truly long-term vision of
regeneration based on dedication and perseverance in a deeply
challenging context, not waiting for the winds to change first.
Because when we spend time with more-than-human beings or take
shared responsibility for their protection, it's pretty special.
Frank has probably spent more time than anyone with freshwater
pearl muscles, and they've changed him, changed how he sees
his role in life. Even just noticing aquatic species whilst
I stand up to my knees in a river is a mind-shifting
experience.
Frank Mitchell: And then, if you come here and look through the
bathyscope, and I move things gently across. And if you look
in there, you'll see the mussels underneath the wood.
Caitlin Kennedy: Wow... there's so many in there!
Frank Mitchell: Yep, and sometimes I'm marking where the
old mussels are. Why are they there in the first place?
They're there because this is where they wanted to be. Just
because I'm working with them so long, it's nice to see them, but
if you can imagine you put someone out here, you've
actually reared that on the gills of the fish in the
hatchery, and you let them grow on, and then next thing you go
in and you start harvesting them, and you bring them down
through the hatchery to grow them on, sort them out, and then
you have to take them and put them in here. Then you come back
here in 7 or 8 years time, and they're still here. That, to me,
is magic.
Caitlin Kennedy: I've always found wading in a river magical,
but now I see every riverbed in a whole new light. I see them as
homes to a network of interdependent, fascinating
species that are absolutely worth saving. Frank showed me
how to glimpse into this realm, and now I do it everywhere I go.
And I found a mussel!! And it's a, oh, a whole little collection
of them, and they're really big. These ones must be these ones
must be at least 50 years old. They're nestled in amongst,
amongst underneath a rock, so they're really, really hidden. I
could just tell it because there's a split apart, and I can
see their little fronds are out. They're feeding, you can see the
kind of frilliness. They look very happy, and there they will
stay for the next, you know, another 50 years. Oh, this is so
exciting. I'm thrilled to have found some by myself. Oh, and
another one. Oh, what a fantastic end to the day. But I
will put my hydrophone in and see whether we hear any sounds.
Mendel Skulski: This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by
Caitlin Kennedy and me, Mendel Skulski, with help from Fiona
Glen. It featured the voices of Frank Mitchell, Mary Catherine
Gallagher, Stiofán Cullen, and Sebastian Graham. Music by Olly
Keen, Thumbug, Martin Austwick, Sorcha Kennedy, and our theme by
Sunfish Moon Light. Cover art by the wonderful Alle Silva.
Future Ecologies is an entirely independent listener-supported
podcast, and it simply would not exist without our incredible
patrons. If you'd like to become one, and get early episode
releases, exclusive bonus content, free and discounted
merch like stickers, patches, and toques, plus access to our
community Discord and book club. You can sign up at
futureecologies.net/join
We'll be back before too long with season seven and a few
special treats in the meantime. 'Til then, thanks for listening.