Freshwater Mussels

[jonathanscottlee]

Does anyone know much about freshwater mussels? How to feed them, what environment they can go in, etc. I have heard that they are just like sea mussels but can simply be placed in your tropical freshwater aquarium.

Does anyone have any or know where to get some from?

Cheers,
Jon

 

[jams.alaskan]

Don't know if this helps but it is some interesting trivia nontheless. In the rivers and streams of Alaska we do have freshwater muscles, I was fishing for salmon with a couple of bushbred AK women and we were catching hundreds. I had noticed that many had strange clearish, dics of membrane on their gill plates. One of the gals had been working on her thesis for YEARS and explained that they were muscles(baby) from the ocean that hitch hike on the salmon. She had been working for years on their life cycle and how they got here.
Native alaskans had described harvesting muscles to survive on in some of the cultures - little was known about what they were describing. This gal was amazing in her knowledge and how she had finally discovered their reseeding. Any who, they also can piggy back back to salt water with the salmon and/or just with the current. I'm hundreds of miles inland but I'm just amazed when I find a colony of them - amazing to think of the journey it takes to get here!!!

ALASKA

 

[Opcn]

There is an invasive species in the great lakes area called zebra mussels and they would be a good choice or you could go some where like liveaquaria.com and get FW clams. It would be a good idea to go to a near by colledge and ask a biologist to tell you about them or go to your departmant of fish and game biologists seem to love telling people useful bits of information about nature.

Opcn

Edit: If you want to keep a species that can handle your climate but is not from your area you need to sterilise your "old" water when you do a water change Chlorox would work fine.

 

[diVer]

My uncle used to work for a government organization near me that was doing work on the zebra mussle problems. They had about 20 tanks full of the zebra mussels, I think they had other stuff too but I can't remember. I wish I'd had an aquarium then, I would've gotten him to give me some.

 

[Idolz]

Muscles are filter feeders or ... filta feedas as my old bio teacher would say, so if tehre is nutrients in the water then they will do ok.

 

[Opcn]

If zebras have nutrients in the water they will flourish not just do okay.

Opcn

 

[DrOizo]

Taking mussles for bad polluted water is not a good idea. they are filter feeders and filter and collect all the heavy metals and pollutants out of the water so just bear that in mind if somehow you were going to collect some from the wild.

 

[tdins_2]

i just walk to the beach scraped some off a rock and i got myself a buch of zebra mussles the live in more polluted water and clean the waterr a and i think they feed off of small suspended agle and they reproduce like crazy