On the emerald isle of Ireland, an easily-overlooked creature 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.

With the help of guest producer Caitlin Kennedy, we're tracing the modern arc of Northern Ireland through the story of the freshwater pearl mussel.

— — —

🦪 Find photos, citations, and a transcript of this episode at futureecologies.net

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— — —

Featuring the voices of Frank Mitchell, Mary Catherine Gallagher, Stiofán Cullen, and Sebastian Graham.

Music by Olly Keen, Thumbug, Martin Austwick, Sorcha Kennedy, plus our theme by Sunfish Moon Light

From Caitlin:

As well as the episode’s incredible contributors, a huge thank you to everyone at the Ballinderry Rivers Trust, especially Mark Horton for introducing me to freshwater pearl mussels in the first place. Thank you to Dr Evelyn Moorkens and Dr Ian Killeen for their tireless work researching this endangered species over the past 30 years: without them, Irish pearl mussels would be in much worse shape. I'm incredibly grateful to Wetland Surveys Ireland, Dennis Funk, Sarah Jones & John D’Arcy for helping bring this project to life and to Carrie, Sorcha & Garfield for lending an ear with wise words of feedback. And finally, thank you Karina for lending me hydrophones and sharing in my sonic enthusiasm and Jessie for endlessly nerding out about mollusks with me - hopefully we'll come back as one in the next life.

See also: Caitlin's article about nacre for Scientific American, and her soundcloud

PS. Please do not go stomping around in sensitive Northern Irish river habitat looking for mussels without a survey license!

You are listening to Season Six of

Future Ecologies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just watch your step. You wouldn't drop into a

hole or something.

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.

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.

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!

See them in there?

Oh yeah!

You see them underneath the bark of the tree?

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

And I've been here now for the last 30 years.

running freshwater pearl mussel breeding program in the world.

Frank spent his youth fishing the Ballinderry's

dappled banks and building weirs out of sticks near its source.

I was born and raised on the Ballinderry River.

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.

And I never realized that I would be

actually working on such an interesting and important

project with the freshwater pearl mussels.

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.

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.

Frank reaches down into one of the makeshift

riverbeds and stirs some recently settled sediment back

into the flow of the river.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

Almost like us producing eye goo.

Mary Catherine Gallagher: Yes, exactly, but a lot more

beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There are few habitat records from the 50s,

but mussels were undoubtedly more numerous than they are now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of the changes to society happened

after the famine.

This is Sebastian Graham, a historian

with Ireland Heritage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bloody mills everywhere.

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.

Isn't that amazing

Big old lake!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

The war might have been one on linen, but it

would also be its downfall. Huge technological leaps brought in

the age of plastic.

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!

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.

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.

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.

In all my time, I never really taken any one

side of anything, because I'm kind of neutral in all these

things.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow... there's so many in there!

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.

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.

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

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We'll be back before too long with season seven and a few

special treats in the meantime. 'Til then, thanks for listening.