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I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussel
by del82 3mo ago
I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussels be used for buttons? That would create (even more) economic incentive to go after them.
- giarc 3mo agoAs noted in the article, plastic buttons displaced buttons made from clamshells long ago. I doubt a market for zebra mussel buttons could make any dent on the population.
- fmajid 3mo agoPremium shirts still have shell buttons. Zebra mussels are too small to make buttons, however.
- kevin_thibedeau 3mo agoI have one shell button shirt. They're annoyingly thin.
- fmajid 3mo agoYes, cheaper ones can be very thin, to save on material and produce twice as many buttons. The trick to identify genuine shell buttons is to to touch one against your upper lip. A shell button will feel cool to the touch, a plastic one won't.
- stronglikedan 3mo agosmall, or thin? they look wide enough when I pull up some images, but it's hard to gauge how thin they are
- Broken_Hippo 3mo agoIn college, I worked as a lab assistant for a professor studying them. I spent a lot of time counting microscopic young, scraping adults off of traps, measuring and weighing them before cracking them open to scoop out their insides and weighing them. These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells. Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.
- edm0nd 3mo agoyou can use anything for buttons if you are dedicated enough and have the right tools
- cad1 3mo agoProbably not as economical as cheap plastic buttons, and harvesting them at low cost would likely disrupt native species too
- vitally3643 3mo agoAn economic incentive to hunt a particular species does not result in a decrease in population. What you have instead is an economic incentive to breed large populations in uncontrolled conditions, likely on public land, which then get abandoned and/or released when you realize the economic incentive has made your invasive species problem far, far worse. This has happened many times throughout history.
- m3047 3mo agoYes, for instance a bounty on rats leads to pet rats and tailless rats.
- shawn_w 3mo agoThere's a simple solution to that. Tax the rat farms.
- DiscourseFan 3mo agoNow there are blackmarket rat farms
- im3w1l 3mo agoAnimals have also been hunted to extinction though so I think it's more fair to say it can go either way.