Even more varied and underappreciated than the salamander is the freshwater mussel.
Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world's total, live in the Smokies. Smokies
mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface
pearlymussel. Unfortunately, that is where all interest in them ends. Because they are so
little regarded, even by naturalists, mussels have vanished at an exceptional rate. Nearly
half of all Smokies mussels species are endangered; twelve are thought to be extinct.
This ought to be a little surprising in a national park. I mean it's not as if mussels are
flinging themselves under the wheels of passing cars. Still, the Smokies seem to be in the
process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something
of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most
interesting--certainly the most striking-- example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than
half a century under the Park Service's stewardship lost seven species of mammal--the
white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox,
and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had
survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an
interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from
America's national parks this century.
Here in the Smokies, not far from where Katz and I now trod, the Park Service in 1957
decided to "reclaim" Abrams Creek, a tributary of the Little Tennessee River, for rainbow
trout, even though rainbow trout had never been native to Abrams Creek. To that end,
biologists dumped several drums of a poison called rote-none into fifteen miles of creek.
Within hours, tens of thousands of dead fish were floating on the surface like autumn
leaves. Among the thirty-one species of Abrams Creek fish that were wiped out was one
called the smoky madtom, which scientists had never seen before. Thus, Park Service
biologists managed the wonderfully unusual accomplishment of discovering and
eradicating in the same instant a new species of fish. (In 1980, another colony of smoky
madtoms was found in a nearby stream.)
Of course, that was forty years ago, and such foolishness would be unthinkable in
these more enlightened times. Today the National Park Service employs a more casual
approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing--less than 3 percent
of its budget--on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are
extinct or even why they are going extinct. Everywhere you look in the eastern forests,
trees are dying in colossal numbers. In the Smokies, over 90 percent of Fraser firs--a
noble tree, unique to the southern Appalachian highlands--are sick or dying, from a
combination of acid rain and the depredations of a moth called the balsam woolly adelgid.
Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, "We are monitoring the
situation closely." For this, read: "We are watching them die."
Or consider the grassy balds--treeless, meadowy expanses of mountaintop, up to 250
acres in extent, which are quite unique to the southern Appalachians. No one knows why
the balds are there, or how long they have existed, or why they appear on some
mountains but not others. Some believe they are natural features, perhaps relics of
lightning fires, and some believe that they are man-made, burned or cleared to provide
land for summer grazing. What is certain is that they are central to the character of the
Smokies. To climb for hours through cool, dark forest and emerge at last onto the
liberating open space of a sunny bald, under a dome of blue sky, with views to every
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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