9:26 p.m. - 2003-09-04
Pink Muckets
Hmmmmm....I hear Screamin' Jay Hawkins has been saying perverted things from beyond the grave to Miz'Tater on her birthday.
Dayam!! I am sooooo jealous!!
Hey Tater, maybe your one of Jay's Kids!!! Man, wouldn't THAT be bizarre, to be one of Screamin' Jay Hawkin's KIDS???!!!
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Um...that was an inside joke about Screamin' Jay talking to Tater!! Sorry folks!!
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Bruce has been running around like a madman lately, but a happy sort of madman. It's the second week of the semester, with all the attentant semester-beginning insanity ("I know you're class is already overbooked by thirty people, Professor, but I'm supposed to graduate in December and I just need this one class and if I don't take it now blah blah yappy yah yah...")
He's also taken on a research project. It goes like this: Alabama is very concerned about its mussel population. This is because way back when buttons were made from mother of pearl, many of the mussel species which were used for these buttons were decimated. A number of these species are still endangered in Alabama. In a rare show of concern for the environment, the State (with federal prodding) has become almost neurotic about protecting them.
What this means is that, among other things, every time the Department of Transportation works on one of the bridges going over the Tennessee River they have to hire river divers to go down to the river bed, take up every single mussel they can find, gently place them into baskets, bring them up, catalogue them, and then they have to take them to a safe spot far away from the construction and gently put them back by hand in an appropriate substrate.
And they have to hire a Ph.D. biologist with experience with mussels and an endangered species handling permit to supervise the process. Which is where my charming husband comes in.
Last year they moved 6900 mussels.
Bruce is hoping to get a scientific paper out of it. They do this every year, so it could eventually be a really interesting mussel population study.
So far they have been working for two weeks and have found 45 endangered Pink Muckets("all adult or VERY adult" says Bruce) and 1 endangered Rough Pigtoe (you think I'm making these names up, don't you?). The Pink Muckets, especially, are very exciting. They have beautiful pale pink inner shells. (That would be the "nacre" for all you biology weenies.) It's easy to see why the mother of pearl button manufacturers were crazy about them.
The river divers also found 10 guns that people had thrown over the bridge into the river! Well, hey, we are in Alabama!
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