Immersion

A beautifully written and illuminating look at the lives of freshwater mussels and their impact on river health.

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In Immersion: The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels, Abbie Gascho Landis brings readers to a hotbed of mussel diversity, the American Southeast, to seek mussels where they eat, procreate, and, too often, perish. Accompanied often by her husband, a mussel scientist, and her young children, she learned to see mussels on the creekbed, to tell a spectaclecase from a pigtoe, and to worry what vanishing mussels, 70 percent of North American species are imperilled, will mean for humans and wildlife alike. In Immersion, Landis shares this journey, travelling from perilous river surveys to dry streambeds and into laboratories where endangered mussels are raised one precious life at a time. Mussels have much to teach us about the health of our watersheds if we step into the creek and take a closer look at their lives. In the tradition of writers like Terry Tempest Williams and Sy Montgomery, Landis gracefully chronicles these untold stories with a veterinarian's careful eye and the curiosity of a naturalist.In turns joyful and sobering, Immersion is an invitation to see rivers from a mussel's perspective, a celebration of the wild lives visible to those who learn to search.