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Polish city is using mussels to monitor water quality (2020)
- NaOH 2y ago(2020) Similarly, from 2019, Check Out These Mussels: Minneapolis Using Mollusks To Monitor Water Quality: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/mussels-helping-monitor-water-quality-in-minneapolis/ https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/mussels-helping-monit...
- wwarek 2y agoCovered nicely by Tom Scott some time ago: https://youtu.be/i0RkEs3Xwf0 https://youtu.be/i0RkEs3Xwf0
- klausa 2y agoWeirdly enough that's about a completely different water treatment plant in a different part of the country.
- jakozaur 2y agoSeveral Polish cities got that systems. It may sound unusual, but it is pragmatic system. Poland during cold war was suppose to be battleground and protecting water supply is hard. Many traditional systems have some gaps.
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- jf 2y agoI recently learned about a similar use of animals for assisting humans: In about 1915, he tried a more natural approach to control the street lighting in Brightwater – chicken power. They didn't have time switches in those days, so he connected a switch to the perches in his chicken house. When the chickens started to roost at night the weight would turn the lighting on and in the morning when they got down off their perches, the spring switch would turn the generator and lighting off. Via: https://www.theprow.org.nz/people/robert-ellis/ https://www.theprow.org.nz/people/robert-ellis/
- gambiting 2y agoSome designs for nuclear bombs included live chickens which would produce enough heat to keep the electronics active: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3588465.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3588465.stm
- lukan 2y agoThat is one of the most weirdest (and messed up) thing I have read in a while. And they say it is not a fools day story despite it surfaced on 1.April, but I am not convinced. But they also don't say how serious that plan was. It was never more than a theoretical concept it seems, after all.
- rtkwe 2y agoThere was a fringe-y program in WW2 run by Skinner to try to train pigeons to act as primitive guidance computers for glide bombs. It only got minor funding and AFAIK was never tested with actual birds in actual bombs but they were able to train the birds and it seems like it could have worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
- benjiro 2y agoLet me trump that with the bat (fire)bomb! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
- grvbck 2y agoAlso, trojan rats: > During WWII, British Special Forces considered stuffing dead rats with explosives and dispersing them over Germany. They hoped that the Germans would gather the rats and dispose of them in industrial furnaces, producing tremendous explosions that would cause catastrophic boiler failures. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontaylor https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontayl...
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- andrewstuart 2y agoI knew a veterinarian who never ate anything like mussels. Asked why, he said "I know what they eat."
- veunes 2y agoMussels are basically living water filters
- Mistletoe 2y agoA weird approach to bioaccumulation which gets worse the higher in trophic level you go. Things like clams and sardines have the lowest levels of mercury etc. Swordfish and big tuna the worst.
- bell-cot 2y agoHistorically, the mussels harvested for eating have mostly lived very near the shoreline, and in areas with higher-density human populations. So their diets contained enormously higher concentrations of civilization's myriad water pollutants, compared to big deep-water fish.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI don't know if that is right. https://onnalomd.com/blog/fish-mercury-pcb-levels https://onnalomd.com/blog/fish-mercury-pcb-levels Mussels PCBs is 0.8-7 ng/g and albacore tuna is 100. Mercury looks similar. I do notice that sardines seem higher in PCBs than I would have expected but their mercury is low.
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- tornadofart 2y agoshell scripting taken to a new level
- jwr 2y agoThat's not new, and it isn't even the only city doing this, Warsaw has been doing it for a long time now: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wild-life-excerpt-water-quality-mussels https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wild-life-excerpt-wate...
- M4v3R 2y agoCan confirm, I live in a much smaller city and we do have a water treatment and monitoring plant that does the same.
- DoctorOetker 2y agoyou are correct but the article you cite seems to be dated 2024... AFAIK its a Belgian-Polish research activity at least since 2006, potentially other places have done this earlier: https://www.gva.be/cnt/oid417904 https://www.gva.be/cnt/oid417904 Before this ozone peaks were being detected with clovers and gladiola's...
- veunes 2y agoWhat happens if pollutants build up slowly, rather than in a sudden spike that causes the mussels to close?
- praptak 2y agoThen they can be detected by slower and more precise methods like periodically analyzing the samples in a traditional lab.
- hyperman1 2y agoThe same is done for detecting water quality in de Scheldt river in Belgium and the Netherlands.
- WickedMo 2y agoThey do a very similar thing in the Netherlands by monitoring water flea populations.
- edwinjm 2y agoThe Dutch do it quite some time as well. Video (in Dutch, but intersting to see) https://www.rtvnoord.nl/video/863704/mosselmonitor-gaat-gronings-water-testen https://www.rtvnoord.nl/video/863704/mosselmonitor-gaat-gron...
- RugnirViking 2y agoUsed to be good friends with a polish girl whose father worked on this. I was amazed but she really considered it no big deal.
- n0rdy 2y agoIt's quite a creative approach. I have a question about it, though, as the person whose expertise is far from biology: how much time does it take for the species to adapt / evolve under the new reality? For example, the city I live in has access to the sea. Which means that there are plenty of seagulls and another type of bird that looks similar but has a slightly larger size (not sure about its name). However, I can observe that many of them are searching for food not in the sea, but rather in the trash bins quite far from the sea, in front of McDonald's and other fast food places, where they can steal the food from the hand of the person leaving the building. This gives me a hint that their behavior changed quite a lot due to the new conditions they live in. Is the same possible with the mussels that the "mussels are well known for clamping their shells shut when water quality is poor" fact might change within a short time? Or does it take generations to evolve like that?
- sznio 2y agoYou seem to be conflating evolution with learning. Seagulls didn't evolve to steal from trashcans, they learned to. As for the main point of your question: the clams are replaced every so often, so they won't end up getting used to the city water and stop serving as a marker.
- n0rdy 2y agoGot it, learning is something that can be acquired relatively quickly, while evolving needs generations. Thanks for the explanation.
- grvbck 2y agoValid question though, and the answer to what I think you wanted to know is >3 months: > the clams are “paid back after three months of work by releasing them to a place from which they will never be caught again”. [---] this is done because they eventually become resistant to contamination in the water. https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/poznan-mussel-water-plants-892524/ https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/poznan-mussel-water-plant...
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- incontrol 2y agoI believe mussels are now (2025) protecting more cities. What is cool about Warsaw is the TAWARA-RTM (TAp WAter RAdioactivity Real Time Monitor. "Warsaw as the first city in the world is protected by a comprehensive system that is capable to monitor in real-time radioactivity of municipal water and by an innovative spectroscopy system capable to identify any detected contaminants" https://www.ncbj.gov.pl/en/aktualnosci/state-art-system-monitors-radioactivity-water-supplied-warsaw-municipal-network https://www.ncbj.gov.pl/en/aktualnosci/state-art-system-moni...
- dorfsmay 2y agoInteresting and surprising, to see that they have English versions online.
- Xelbair 2y agoAlmost all(i haven't checked them all myself) government sites in Poland have both Polish and English versions.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoIt's likely already planned, but testing for radioactivity in wastewater too would likely detect any released radioactive material that didn't impact tap water.
- skirge 2y ago"forces of nature in the service of man" - classic polish comedy ;)
- dorfsmay 2y agoAn article (in French) published this morning about the city of Paris monitoring the Seine River and just discovered DNA of three endengered mussel species. They also mention that there are ten times the number of fish species compared to 1960. https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-billet-vert/a-paris-la-decouverte-dans-la-seine-de-moules-d-eau-douce-en-voie-de-disparition-confirme-le-bon-etat-de-sante-du-fleuve_7024442.html https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-billet-vert/a-pa...
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- philipov 2y agoThey missed a chance to name the research program Mussel Training
- jsbg 2y agoTangentially-related is the use of oysters to clean waterways: https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/project/eutrophication-oyster-aquaculture-potomac-river/#:~:text=Oysters%2C%20which%20feed%20by%20filtering,can%20cause%20poor%20water%20quality. https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/project/eutrophication-oyste...
- bell-cot 2y agoSeems odd that nobody has mentioned "canary in coal mine", or the general case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species
- sfink 2y agoSome form of this is quite common. My town's water treatment plant uses fish. They have all of their automatic monitoring things, but they also have a school of fish in the water coming out of the last stage of the plant, just before releasing it. They keep an eye on the fish. If they die, they know there's a problem and shut things down. On a tour, I asked the obvious question: isn't that a little late? By the time the fish are dead, haven't you released a large quantity of hazardous water? The response was basically a shrug and "it's better than nothing". I think I like the Polish approach better.