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Putting mussels to the test

With a mussel hatchery in the future for the Schuylkill River, students in Byron Sherwood’s field biology course used scientific rigor to ask how effectively these filter feeders might render the water clean.
One student uses a pipette to take a water sample as another holds a fishing net full of mussels in front of six aquariums, three with mussels and three without. An instructor and a third student carefully place more mussels in one tank.
It was all hands on deck as Byron Sherwood (center) and members of his field biology class tested the ability of freshwater mussels to remove particles and bacteria from Schuylkill River water. Students (from left) Ahsen Kayani, Izzy Viney, Eric Ellison, and JaHyun Yang, as well as T.C. Sun (not pictured), busied themselves collecting DNA, culturing bacteria, and evaluating how much sediment the mussels filtered out. 

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