The power of a faceless organism: The use of bivalves as indicators and mitigators of environmental change

Background/Question/Methods

Certain species are able to persist in even the most degraded habitats, while other species respond to the slightest alteration of their environment. People have harnessed this knowledge to gauge the extent of detrimental anthropogenic effects occurring within ecosystems, and the organisms used to indicate environmental changes are known as bioindicators. As suspension feeders, bivalves remove organic debris and plankton out of the water column during their normal feeding process, and consequently provide important water filtration services to humans. This feeding mode makes them particularly important indicators of many different types of environmental changes in both freshwater and marine systems. We follow the history of the use of bivalves as indicators of change, with a particular focus on Edward D. Goldberg, who championed the use of bivalves as indicators of pollution. We examine the role that Goldberg has played in this capacity, beginning with his studies on the effects of pollutants on individual species of bivalves, through his development of the Mussel Watch Program, which still persists today. We argue that the role of bivalves not only as indicators of environmental change, but more recently, as mitigators of these changes in their use in restoring degraded ecosystem services.

Results/Conclusions

The use of the faceless filterers use as the canaries in the coalmine of habitat, community, or ecosystem condition has come full-circle. Many restoration programs are in place to restore degraded bivalve populations to mitigate the effects of human-induced changes in the environment. State and federal governments now fund both programs that use bivalves to signal pollution and programs that restore bivalves to ameliorate ecosystem health. This injection of funding may serves as a sign that the importance of bivalves has moved past purely using them as indicators of environmental change to using them to mitigate environmental change. Indeed the same metrics that are used to determine if a bivalve is responding to an environmental change are the same metrics that are used to determine if a bivalve population or community is being successfully restored.