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“Northern riffleshell, snuffbox, clubshell and rayed bean” Remember those names for soon they may indeed be nothing more than memories. An invader has come to America from the mysterious seas of Central Asia. This interloper stowed away and came to America 30 years ago. Authorities are powerless to stop the rampage of terror. It has already conquered the sinister-sounding Lake Erie, a freshwater sea which is found deep in the hinterlands of…wait…Lake Erie borders New York ? [checks notes]
What on Earth is going on here?
You may think this absurd looking creature is a sentient hockey puck or the ghost of Jim Backus. It is instead a goby…a tribe of fish which are sort of the prairie dogs of the sea. This is the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus). It is a hard-headed omnivorous fish which can live in both fresh and salt water. Originally native to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the tiny fish is thought to have come to the Great Lakes by stowing away in ballast water of a freighter. Since its arrival in the Saint Lawrence Seaway, it has made the entire Great Lakes its home and it is now spreading along the rivers and creeks radiating from the lakes.
This is a pretty impressive feat and nobody is castigating the ugly little fish for being lazy or weak. In fact it is even sort of endearing in a crude 1970s cartoon sort of way.
My god, what happened during that decade?
Unfortunately the gobies’ unstoppable appetite is leading to the extinction of indigenous freshwater mussels like the Northern riffleshell and clubshell mussels. Freshwater mussels were already in trouble because of pollution, habitat loss, and stream degradation. Now they have to contend with this formidable 9 inch long 2 ounce predator. I have written this article with a joking touch, but, sadly, this sequence of events is no joke. Ecologists are worried that the gobies will continue to spread (particularly with the help of careless anglers, who use them as live bait). Understanding and curtailing the proliferation of alien species causing havoc in unprepared ecosystems is one of the defining environmental challenges of our times (which are filled with environmental challenges), but so far nobody has figured out how to do so. Perhaps in the future the Great Lakes will be filled with the descendants of round gobies eating zebra mussels. Sometimes it seems like nobody and nothing can keep up with the pace of change.
Disturbing news from the world of workplace safety. Gillian Genser, a 59-year-old Canadian sculptor, has been suffering from worsening pain, splitting headaches, and nausea for nearly a decade and a half. She visited a range of specialized neurologists and endocrinologists, but none of them could pinpoint the nature of her malady which grew worse to the point that she was immobilized and suffered complete loss of hearing in one ear. She was unable to distinguish up from down, forgot the names and faces of people, she knew her whole life, and discovered herself wandering the streets for no reason shouting profanities. The doctors suspected heavy-metal poisoning, but Genser vehemently insisted that her materials were all natural.
If you are an artist yourself, you are probably shouting—but this is clearly heavy metal poisoning! And you are right: Genser finally was diagnosed with acute arsenic and lead poisoning after one of her physicians insisted on a blood test. Yet Genser was not a painter (like me, sigh) nor did she cast in metals or use exotic glazes and stains. Her only materials were silver and mussel shells which she polished agonizingly by hand.
She obtained the blue mussels from a market in Toronto’s Chinatown and ate the mollusks with friends. She then used the shells for her larger than life anatomical sculpture of Adam, the mythical first human from the Abrahamic faiths. Sadly, whoever was providing the shellfish was obtaining them from water which was heavily polluted. Mussels store metals in their shells, and Genser’s polishing, sanding, and shaping freed the trapped pollutants into dust which she inhaled (although eating 3 meals a week of mussel flesh probably didn’t help either). The story is even more troubling when one reflects that blue mussels are an Atlantic shellfish and Toronto is at least 800 kilometers (500 miles) from the waves.
Hey! Has anyone noticed that Toronto is apparently right next to New York State? Where were these mussels from anyway?
The moral here in not “don’t be an artist” or “don’t eat mussels” (although, come to think of it, those are extremely plausible lessons). Instead everyone needs to be careful in the modern world to watch out for hazardous materials which proliferate in unexpected ways from novel sources. Of course, this is hardly a soothing message since most of us are not chemists (much less endocrinologists) and it looks like even those experts can’t always see where problems are coming from. Maybe the real lesson is that humankind’s vast numbers and sophisticated industrial society are fundamentally inimical to the web of life which sustains us. Actually, that is an even less comfortable message…but, well, I am not a politician here to sooth you with lies. We have learned how to protect ourselves from the natural world. Now we are going to have to learn (quickly) how to protect the natural world from ourselves.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the sculpture that caused such suffering for Genser (see the photos above from the artist). It looks like the metal-poisoning started to fundamentally work its way into the sculpture itself—in terms of conception, execution, AND material (obviously). Yet there is something oddly appropriate about the subject matter (Adam’s choices, after all, are a metaphor for humankind’s great metamorphosis from hunter-gathering beings to civilization-building farmers and crafters). The dark armless statue with the alien face and the black glistening muscles and nacreous organs, seems to be a sort of manifestation of heavy metal poisoning. The whole 15 year project has inadvertently become a performance piece about the pain of the world (just think of those poor mussels which can’t even move to escape their poisoned home waters). I hope that the short-lived media burst helps Genser’s career, but I also hope she switches media as soon as possible. While we are making wishes, let’s express some really heartfelt aspirations to be better stewards of the oceans. They are the cradle of life…yet they are being sadly abused.
Statue of Molly Malone (Jeanne Rynhart, 1988, Bronze)
One of my favorite mawkish songs is “Cockles and Mussels.” Not only is it a stirring melodramatic ballad concerning the sad death of a young Irishwoman, it is probably the only known song to feature ghost mollusks! Let’s review the lyrics:
In Dublin’s fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,
As she wheeled her wheel-barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
“Alive, alive, oh,
Alive, alive, oh”,
Crying “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh”.
She was a fishmonger,
But sure ’twas no wonder,
For so were her father and mother before,
And they each wheeled their barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
(chorus)
She died of a fever,
And no one could save her,
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone.
Now her ghost wheels her barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!
That seems pretty clear—the cockles and mussels travel beyond the grave with Molly and her ghost is left trying to sell their spirits in the variously sized thoroughfares of Ireland’s capital (even to me, that sounds like a futile business plan—who is the projected customer base here?). The harrowing supernatural drama reminds me that I need to add posts about cockles (which are tiny edible saltwater clams found on sandy beaches worldwide) and mussels to Ferrebeekeeper’s mollusk category.
Beyond her working connection to the vast phylum of mollusks, her sweetness, and her death, little is known concerning Molly Malone. This is ironic since the longstanding international success of the song has made her an unofficial mascot of Dublin and a mainstay of tourism there. Various amateur historians have unsuccessfully tried to link the song with a historical personage to no avail. It seems the ditty was created from imagination by a Scottish balladeer late in the nineteenth century and it was first published in the 1880s in America!
A clean line illustration of Molly for Waltons' Sheet Music to the Song
However the paucity of information has not stopped artists from portraying Molly (as is evident from the pictures dotted through this post). Even if the song was an invention there is a real sense of futility, heartbreak and loss to it. And just think of the poor ghostly shellfish spending eternity being hawked in the in-between neverworld of Dublintown.
The cover of "Sweet Molly Malone" by Mel Fisher and Dave Orchard
ferrebeekeeper 