The Long Game of Preserving the ‘Livers of the River’

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Luke Etchison couldn’t do anything for the fish, mussels, and other river critters that he dedicated his professional life to saving. Not with the remnants of a killer hurricane bearing down, a wife and 3-year-old daughter to protect, and a river rampaging below his Western North Carolina home.  

The conservation biologist woke early that September morning in 2024 as Tropical Storm Helene’s fury reached the southern Appalachians. Heavy rains and high winds rolled across his Botany Woods neighborhood just outside of Asheville on the Swannanoa River. Once the sky lightened, the devastation became clear: Trees toppled onto homes; power lines crisscrossed roads; and houses washed away at the bottom of the hill where the bloated river U-turned around the neighborhood. 

“We really didn’t know how extreme all the damage was going to be,” Etchison said. “But then as we walked down to the river, it was like, ‘Holy crap.’ This was worse and worse than we thought.”  

Etchison also couldn’t help but wonder about all of Western North Carolina’s rivers and streams, where the sicklefin redhorse (fish), Appalachian elktoe (mussel), and other freshwater animals were barely hanging on before Helene dumped 2 feet of rain. He’s an aquatic expert for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, after all, and responsible for the survival of the already imperiled species. 

“As a biologist, you tend to think if you protect things, nothing can impact them,” Etchison said. “But then, with Helene, I’d think everything I’d been working on was gone.” 

The critically endangered elktoe, found in only a few Western North Carolina rivers, suffered grievously from Helene. Extinction would be a serious blow to the region’s ecology and environmental restoration. A lot of scientific attention has been focused on the Appalachian elktoe to keep it alive and get it off the federal endangered species list. 

As go the mussels, so goes the river. They’re the “livers of the river,” capable of filtering up to 15 gallons of water a day—water contaminated by algae, bacteria, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, E. coli, and other toxic substances. 

“As a biologist, you tend to think if you protect things, nothing can impact them. But then, with Helene, I’d think everything I’d been working on was gone.” 

Luke Etchison, N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission

Mussels bundle pollutants and organic particles into “pseudo-feces” for hungry insects, which in turn become meals for fish, salamanders, and birds. Mussel beds also stabilize the surrounding mud and gravel, which keeps erosion at bay. And animals decidedly less finicky than humans, like muskrats and raccoons, pry the mussels from their shells for food. 

Yet perhaps a mussel’s most critical role is as a sentinel species, alerting the wider world to dangers ahead. They’re the freshwater equivalent of the canary in a coal mine.  

“Losing those mussels is the first warning shot that the rivers are in trouble,” said Michael Gangloff, a malacologist, or mussel expert, at Appalachian State University. “They’re the most sensitive indicator of water quality, and it should be taken very seriously when these animals start to disappear.” 

Last month marked the two-year anniversary of one of the worst storms ever to hit North Carolina. Helene bore all the nasty hallmarks of climate change run amok: the boom-bust cycle of drought and deluge; high heat; record ocean and stream temperatures; rapidly developing hurricanes; ungodly amounts of rain. 

In Western North Carolina, though, there’s a sense that the mountains offer protection from killer storms just as they do against outsiders of all kinds. Besides, it’s always cooler and greener up here, unlike the rest of the state. 

Yet it’s these very mountains, including sky-high Mount Mitchell, that felt Helene’s rage. 

“What we’re seeing–the frequency and intensity of storms–leaves no doubt that our climate is changing,” Etchison said while overlooking the South Toe River this summer. “People in the mountains don’t think it can happen here. They think it’s just a coastal thing. But it’s here. We’ve got to quit acting like they’re just freak events.”  

Rainy Havoc

Helene’s wrath shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Since 1895, the state’s average annual temperature has registered a pleasant 59 degrees, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Western North Carolina averages about 4 degrees cooler. 

A decade ago, though, things got hot. The state’s three hottest years have come since 2017. The mountains were no exception. Yancey County, home to Mount Mitchell, had its hottest year ever in 2024.  

But it’s the rain—the sudden downpours, the crawling deluges, the hurricane remnants—that wreak the most havoc on the mountains. Yancey County, like the state as a whole, hasn’t seen a major uptick in precipitation over the years. It averages a bit more than 52 inches annually, about an inch more rain than in the late 19th century. 

“Losing those mussels is the first warning shot that the rivers are in trouble.”

Michael Gangloff, Appalachian State University malacologist

But it’s the velocity, timing, and concentration of the precipitation that’s alarming. A Columbia University study from 2019 revealed that the fall season in the southeastern United States had become 40 percent wetter than it had been over the previous 124 years. Three of Yancey County’s four wettest years have come since 2013. 

Hurricane Helene’s speed and power were stoked by the Gulf of Mexico’s 84-degree surface waters—almost 2 degrees warmer than the average. The Gulf has been warming at twice the rate of the world’s oceans. The same heat-trapping scoundrel that raises atmospheric temperatures—carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels—raises ocean temperatures, too. 

Too-warm seawater evaporates and gets pumped into the atmosphere, where the water vapor condenses into clouds, rain, and hurricanes.  

In all, the rain gauge on Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet the tallest mountain east of the Rockies, recorded more than 24 inches.  

The mountains, like the Gulf, turboboosted the storm. In a weather phenomenon known as orographic uplift, Helene’s winds pushed the rain up the western sides of the Black and Great Balsam mountain ranges where it met colder air. Cool air doesn’t hold as much water vapor as warm air, so Helene’s moisture turned into clouds, which dumped even more rain on the windward side of the mountains.

Rain gauges on the leeward, or eastern, side of the Black Mountains recorded less than half as much rain as fell atop Mount Mitchell. Carl Schreck, the interim associate director of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, said ever-warming temperatures boosted Helene’s rainfall by as much as 20 percent.  

“With climate change, what we’re absolutely most confident about is that heat waves will get stronger and hotter, and these heavy rainfall events will get wetter and more common,” he said. “Things’ll get worse before they get better, even if we stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere today. The planet will continue to get worse for years to come.”  

South Toe Hit Hard

Etchison, his wife Katherine and daughter Frances (“Frankie”) evacuated Asheville four days later for Concord, where Katherine’s parents live. Botany Woods was a mess: impassable roads; no water, electricity, or cell service; fear of looters and more rain.  

“My No. 1 priority was getting Frankie out of that situation,” said Etchison, 39.

He returned every few days to the neighborhood with water, food and batteries. He attended the community’s daily meetings. Eventually, his “work brain started turning back on,” he said. 

In November, after the family came home, Etchison went back to work full-time.  

He started by assessing the condition of the dozen rivers under his purview that flow from the Appalachians, including the Swannanoa, French Broad, Little Tennessee, Tuckaseegee, and South Toe. Etchison is responsible for recovering 65 mussel, fish, crayfish, and snail species. He focused, though, on five at-risk species, including the Appalachian elktoe.

Etchison met with federal officials to coordinate the removal of debris—houses, cars, propane tanks, barns, PVC pipes—from the rivers. Armies of contractors with backhoes and excavators were paid more than $1.6 billion to rid the streams of nearly 7 million cubic yards of debris, according to federal agencies. Etchison tried, unsuccessfully, to ensure that the underwater homes of fish and mussels weren’t harmed.  

Most of the damage, though, had already been done. The South Toe, fed by streams coming off Mount Mitchell and other steep slopes, was hit especially hard. 

Mount Mitchell served as a “hydrological hub” for the devastation unleashed on the narrow valleys below. Water rampaged down the mountains, dislodging dirt, trees, and rocks. The South Toe’s river bottom was scoured clean, pushing farther downstream the sediment, pebbles, vegetation, and snags that animals depend upon for survival. 

Hellbenders, the freakishly large salamanders also known as snot otters, washed up dead in farm fields hundreds of feet away. Boulders the size of VW buses came to rest in once-clear river reaches. Helene stripped bare tree-covered islands.  

“We’ve got to quit acting like they’re just freak events.”  

Luke Etchison, N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission

“The South Toe got absolutely wrecked. It was definitely a gut punch, for sure,” Etchison said. “This is our best site on our best river—the South Toe is one of the most pristine rivers in North Carolina—and then it gets dropped on its head.”

He grew up on an Indiana farm with a creek out back: 500 acres of corn and soybeans. His dad farmed responsibly, buffering the fields with plants and trees to reduce erosion and boost biodiversity. Etchison did his undergrad, graduate, and doctoral work at Ball State University, where he met Katherine. 

Soon after Katherine got her dream job as a bat biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Etchison left for Florida to work with Florida’s wildlife agency, mapping habitats and vegetation. A year later, they reunited in North Carolina.  

“I’m a field biologist, and I needed to be out there looking for critters,” Etchison said. Freshwater mussels, or mollusks, are likened to brown rocks that barely move and, unlike their marine brethren, taste awful. They come in all shapes and sizes with colorful names like littlewing pearlymussel (up to 35 millimeters) or washboard (big as a dinner plate). They were once plentiful. A person could cross a river on shells alone.  

The Southeast is home to 90% of North America’s 300 freshwater mussel species. They are the most imperiled group of animals in the U.S. and Canada. Seventy percent of them are extinct, threatened with extinction, or heading that way. The elktoe was added to the federal endangered species list in 1994. But it got in trouble much earlier. 

Manufacturers made shirt buttons from mussels, and by the 1930s the nation’s rivers were stripped nearly clean of bivalves. Hydroelectric dams ruined mussel habitats and the fish they rely on for propagation. Sediment and pesticide runoff from agriculture and logging suffocated and poisoned mussels. Municipal waste did, too. 

Rising temperatures play a deadly role, too, by evaporating river water and lowering dissolved oxygen levels, which can stress and kill mussels. 

Tamara Pandolfo, an associate teaching professor at North Carolina State University, assessed stream and sediment temperatures at 20 sites in the upper reaches of the Tar River in Eastern North Carolina. Summer temperatures in mussel habitats surpassed 82 degrees Fahrenheit for a full day or longer at more than half of the sites. These temperatures can harm mussels, which prefer cool water. 

“Our results demonstrate that freshwater mussels and their host fish are currently experiencing temperatures that exceed their upper thermal tolerances,” Pandolfo and her co-authors concluded in a 2024 report. “Freshwater mussels are particularly at risk from climate change.”   

Mussels don’t suffer the warming world in a vacuum. Virtually every living thing in the Appalachian elktoe’s neighborhood suffers from too much heat, rain, or both. Like the banded sculpin, the tadpole-sized fish that elktoe recruit to spread their larvae. They, too, prefer cool, steadily flowing, cobble-strewn streams. 

Warmer water stresses sculpins as it does mussels. Rainbow, brook, and brown trout increasingly quit the lower, warmer waters of the South Toe for higher, cooler reaches.  

The mountains surrounding the South Toe aren’t spared the climate pain, either. Helene’s rains caused more than 2,000 landslides across the Appalachians, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, while knocking down thousands of trees in the Pisgah National Forest, including the already climate-compromised eastern and Carolina hemlocks. Warmer winters don’t kill the woolly adelgid bugs that suck a hemlock’s sap and kill the tree. Without their shade, mountain streams become even hotter to the detriment of trout, sculpins, and elktoe.

“Every time you lose a species, it puts the entire surrounding community, and other species, at risk,” Etchison said. “And these species are, ultimately, what makes Western North Carolina so special. They’re worth saving. If we can’t save the elktoe, we got bigger problems to worry about.”

In Search of Elktoe

Etchison pulled on a wetsuit, adjusted the snorkel, and readied to float the South Toe in search of elktoe. But first, he needed to finish a peanut butter-and-banana sandwich for the energy to fuel his 6-foot-7 frame upstream over this once-bountiful stretch of the north-flowing river. 

A white-shingled house, its foundation and chimney askew, provided the backdrop. “Jesus Loves You” was spray-painted in red on the river-facing side of the condemned house, a comforting reminder after Helene’s horror. 

Etchison descended to the mica-flecked stream 50 feet away. 

“Today could be friggin’ awesome or—I don’t want to say it—disappointing,” he allowed on a blue-sky morning this summer.  

Scientists have worked hard to save the 3-inch, kidney-shaped mussel: habitat restorations; hatchery propagations; low-head dam removals. Each step forward, though, seems to hit a climate wall. The year 2004 was a particularly grim milepost. The remnants of hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne flooded Western North Carolina. 

No live elktoes were found a year later in the South Toe. Many dead ones were found downstream in the Nolichucky, buried under rubble or washed onto floodplains, according to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.  

Still, the biologists persisted with their recovery plans. And still, the climate refused to cooperate. Each year since 2015, the wildlife agency has surveyed the same six sites on the South Toe. A decade later, no elktoes were found at two of the sites. Three sites registered fewer than 10 mussels. Surveyors, though, found more than 100 elktoes at Site No. 2 outside Micaville.  

Earlier this year, Etchison and colleagues placed 1,000 hatchery-raised elktoe babies, and some adults, along a stretch of the river here. This summer, Etchison hugged the river’s far side, waterproof camera in one hand, the other propelling himself upstream in search of an elktoe’s orange foot sticking out of the mud. Ten minutes later, he surfaced empty-handed. Etchison returned to snorkeling. Ten minutes later, he surfaced again. 

Anything?

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. 

Etchison then sought shallower, swifter water further downstream. He emerged with something in his hand. Two elktoe shells, both empty inside. One was wild. The other was raised in a lab and had a microchip glued to its side detailing its history.

Disappointed? 

“I’d say mixed,” Etchison said. “I’m not thrilled, but not totally in the dumps. I’m getting pretty close to realizing there’s nothing you can do to bring me down, especially in the conservation field. If you don’t learn to grow a thick skin, you’ll be sad all the time.”  

But there’s reason for optimism. A month ago, Etchison discovered a few dozen  elktoes upstream of Site 2. Rivers, in general, are much cleaner, thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972, which established water quality standards for rivers and streams. The abundance of fish species in the South Toe—Etchison observed darters, sculpins, and suckers—bodes well for the river’s overall health. Other nearby rivers, like the French Broad, have mussels to spare. 

Propagating mussels in the lab is increasingly successful. The South Toe’s watershed is heavily forested, which helps cool the river. College students plant American water willows in riverbeds to stabilize soils. And, recently, the Bezos Earth Fund proposed spending an estimated $900,000 to keep the Appalachian elktoe from going extinct. 

“Climate change is definitely a tough variable, no doubt about it,” Etchison said while sitting in the shade of an oak tree. “But these rivers and watersheds are resilient. You just got to keep at it. It’s a long game.”