News-Sentinel.com

Friday, 11/10/2000

TROUBLED WATERS

The endangered white cat's paw

One of the rarest animals on the planet is found in Indiana waters.

By KEVIN KILBANE of The News-Sentinel

It can't soar like a bald eagle. It's not as playful or cuddly as a river otter.

In fact, the white cat's paw pearly mussel probably would prefer to remain hunkered down in the gravel bottom of Fish Creek, anonymously siphoning bits of leaves and other organic matter from the clear water rippling past it.

But the 2-inch-long brown mussel has become a symbol of efforts to conserve the St. Joseph River watershed.

"This is perhaps one of the rarest animals on the planet," said mussel expert Tom Watters, a senior research associate with Ohio State University's Ohio Biological Survey.

"In all the surveys we have done over the last 10 to 12 years (at Fish Creek), I have only seen three live individuals," Watters said.

Watters and other scientists believe that a 5-mile stretch of Fish Creek south of Hamilton Lake is the last place on Earth in which the white cat's paw mussel survives.

The mussel, whose shell resembles the outline of a cat's paw-print, probably once lived throughout the St. Joseph River system and possibly in the upper Wabash River, Watters said.

The white cat's paw had declined so significantly by the early 1970s that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the mussel on the federal endangered species list in 1976. The 31 mussel species found in Fish Creek include two others listed as federally endangered -- the clubshell and northern riffleshell. But the white cat's paw is the rarest and the one most in danger of extinction.

Fish Creek, a narrow, winding St. Joseph River tributary, begins in northwestern Williams County, Ohio, and meanders through Steuben and northeast DeKalb counties in Indiana before emptying into the St. Joseph near Edgerton, Ohio.

The same factors that degrade the St. Joseph as Fort Wayne's drinking water source also adversely impact the white cat's paw and other river inhabitants:

Soil settles on the creek bottom, smothering the mussels. Fertilizers can cause algae blooms, which steal oxygen from the water when the algae die and decompose. Pesticides and weedkillers may harm some of the small fish to which mussel embryos cling briefly before dropping off to begin life on the creek bottom.

To protect Fish Creek's unique aquatic life, the Nature Conservancy has tried to sell farmers on conservation measures, such as no-till planting and creating buffer areas of grass and trees to filter out soil and contaminants before they reach the creek.

Until last year, Larry Clemens, the Nature Conservancy's Upper St. Joseph River Project manager, didn't know whether the conservation measures were helping. Then, during a stream survey late that summer, he and

Watters discovered a live, 6-year-old white cat's paw mussel.

"Finding that one gave us new hope they are reproducing," Clemens says.