Joint lab set up for mussels and pearls
Updated: 2014-02-05 11:54
By Amy He in New York (China Daily USA)
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A joint China-US laboratory dedicated to mussel conservation - with the possibility of introducing a US mussel to China that has the potential to produce colored pearls - is being established.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) and the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center in Wuxi, China are establishing the laboratory.
"Just like the Eastern United States, China has a rich diversity of freshwater mussels, which is imperiled by humans building dams, for instance, and introducing toxin into the waterways," said Eric Hallerman, professor of fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech, as well as a lead researcher at the joint laboratory, in a statement.
Rapid industrialization has worsened pollution and "habitat alteration processes are very much coming to the fore," he told China Daily. While the Yangtze River may have been polluted in the past, it is now highly polluted with at least one dam on it, with many others planned, and that will further impact the freshwater populations, Hallerman said.
To combat that, he explained that China needs to get better baseline data of its freshwater fauna, which includes information on the different species and their spatial distribution across waters. Within a population, scientists can then figure out how many animals within a species are juveniles and how many are reproductive-aged adults, which helps with making demographic models and figure out if an ecosystem is stable or if it is in decline, he said. The US is about "40 years ahead of China" with its more comprehensive baseline data sets, he added.
A North American species of mussels called the pink heelsplitter, which produces pink-to-purple-colored pearls, is "advancing as a candidate species for production of colored freshwater pearls in China," Hallerman said. "The colored pearls would be good for the Chinese pearl industry, and producing the baby mussels in Tennessee for shipment to China would be a good cottage industry for that state."
Together the two research facilities will invite graduate students from China to conduct research in the US and may send US graduate students to China, according to Hallerman.
Past research has honed in on gaining better control over the freshwater mussels' life cycles and reproductive patterns, so the next step is to make the mussels "better," Hallerman said, which can be achieved through selective breeding. Selective breeding is strongly correlated with higher growth rate, according to Hallerman, so geneticists focus on that in order to improve growth rate in the freshwater mussel population, which has been devastated by pollution in both countries.
The idea for the joint research lab - called the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center-Virginia Tech Cooperative International Laboratory for Germplasm Conservation and Utilization of Freshwater Mollusks - came when Chinese doctoral student Hua Dan was at Virginia Tech pursuing her studies. Hua, who before going to Virginia Tech was an associate professor and research supervisor at the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center, decided that a collaboration between the two institutions would help benefit academic research in that field.
"What would it really take to bring a collaboration to another level? And over a series of conversations, we basically came up with the plan to have this collaborative laboratory," Hallerman said.
Hallerman and Hua traveled to Wuxi on multiple occasions to visit field sites and aquatic resource management agencies, and in 2013 a new lab was dedicated for the joint effort.
The lab is a good start in China's efforts to protect its freshwater fauna, Hallerman said. "What I'm seeing now is a moment of change, and I'm heartened by that. Whereas years ago it would've only been the economically important species that were of concern, now I'm starting to see that my colleagues are understanding that even species you don't exploit are important because they're the canaries in the coal mine," he said. "They're the ones that indicate whether that ecosystem is healthy or not, and China's sense of ecosystem health has come a long way."
amyhe@chinadailyusa.com
(China Daily USA 02/05/2014 page2)
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