Immersion : The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels ISBN: 9781610918084 Platform/Publisher: EBSCO eBooks / Island Press Digital rights:Users: unlimited; Printing: limited; Download: limited Subjects: NATURE / General;
"This is nature writing at its best." --E.O. Wilson
"Eloquent treatise...Landis's book is as much call to action as paean to mesmerizing molluscs." -- Nature
"Rich, accurate, and moving." -- New Scientist
"A lyrical love letter to the imperiled freshwater mussel." -- Science
Abbie Gascho Landis first fell for freshwater mussels while submerged in an Alabama creek, her pregnant belly squeezed into a wetsuit. After an hour of fruitless scanning, a mussel materialized from the rocks--a little spectaclecase, herself pregnant, filtering the river water through a delicate body while her gills bulged with offspring. In that moment of connection, Landis became a mussel groupie, obsessed with learning more about the creatures' hidden lives. She isn't the only fanatic; the shy mollusks, so vital to the health of rivers around the world, have a way of inspiring unusual devotion.
In Immersion , 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 imperiled--will mean for humans and wildlife alike. In Immersion , Landis shares this journey, traveling 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.
Abbie Gascho Landis is a writer, veterinarian, and naturalist. She has won Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies 2015 Essay Award, an Arthur DeLong Writing Award, and was a finalist for the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award. Landis holds a bachelor's degree in English and biology from Goshen College and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from The Ohio State University. Her writing has been published in Pinchpenny Press , Full Grown People , and Paste Magazine .
