Jun 1, 2025 By Ben Moyer 5 min read

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC) is restoring the aquatic life of Dunkard Creek, from the bottom up. At its Union City Aquatic Conservation Center in Erie County, PFBC biologists are raising thousands of native freshwater mussels, spawned by a few individuals captured in other western Pennsylvania streams, and releasing them back into Dunkard Creek. PFBC, with help from other groups, notably the Governor’s Youth Council on Hunting, Fishing, and Conservation, planted 11,000 laboratory-raised mussels in the streambed last fall. Before its release, each mussel was hand-painted with a swatch of glitter so it could be identified in future surveys to gauge the project’s success.

Dunkard Creek is a lovely stream, flowing eastward through wooded hills for 37 miles, snaking back-and-forth across the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border from the Greene County village of Brave to join the Monongahela River near Mt. Morris, Greene County. Until 2009, Dunkard Creek was also a dynamic fishery, a popular draw for catching muskies, smallmouth bass, and catfish. Supporting that fishery was a robust population of aquatic insects, crustaceans, amphibians, and native freshwater mussels.

But suddenly, in 2009, every fish, mussel, and water-bound living thing in Dunkard Creek perished. Three-foot muskies with bleeding gills washed ashore and doomed mudpuppy salamanders tried to crawl out of the water. Some toxic cocktail swept the creek’s length, also wiping out 14 species of mussels.

A perfect storm of invasive species and industrial pollution combined to kill the stream. Investigators pinned it on a bloom of invasive, toxic golden algae as the immediate culprit. But they also learned that golden algae can’t live in freshwater and somehow got introduced to the stream from somewhere else. To flourish, as it did in Dunkard Creek, it needs a briny, salty environment. At the time of the kill, dissolved solids (salts and minerals) in Dunkard Creek measured twenty times higher than “normal,” temporarily creating an environment even more salty than seawater. A nearby underground coal mine at Blacksville, WV had long leaked mine water into the creek. And a subsidiary of that mine company operated an injection well on the Pennsylvania side to dispose of “produced water,” used to frack gas wells. At the same time, drilling firms were also drawing thousands of gallons of fresh water from Dunkard Creek for the fracking process.

No entity ever admitted blame for the kill, but Consol Energy, the mine operator, paid $5.5 million in a settlement with West Virginia, and a subsequent owner of the mine, Murray Energy, settled with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission for $2.5 million.

PFBC is using those funds to begin Dunkard Creek’s restoration. The agency converted an aging fish hatchery at Union City into one of only a few dozen mussel propagation labs in the world. Scott Ray, PFBC’s species recovery biologist there has used ingenuity, sparse staff, some help from other groups, and hard work to harvest native mussels from western Pennsylvania’s few remaining source streams and raise their offspring for re-stocking into Dunkard Creek.

Anglers, and even the non-fishing public, might question the worth of putting so much effort and money into a blob of muscle inside a shell that lives on the stream bottom.

“The reason Dunkard Creek was such a good fishery was its mussels,” Ray said. “Mussels filter the water. One mussel filters 10 gallons every day. Then think about tens of thousands of mussels over miles of streambed. You couldn’t design a better water-cleansing system. They also lock up pollutants in their shells, then release them slowly over time, and the shells anchor the stream bottom and reduce erosion. They’re a stabilizing element in a stream ecosystem.”

But even water-cleansing mussels couldn’t survive the 2009 pollution event on Dunkard Creek.

“Fish will come back. The mussels are a generational thing.” Said West Virginia DNR fisheries biologist Frank Jernejcic at the time of the kill.

The relationship between mussels and fish is amazing and complex. During a recent tour of the mussel propagation lab for the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association, Ray explained that each mussel species has evolved its own “living lure,” some specialized structure of its body that resembles a baitfish, crayfish, or even rotting flesh, complete with simulated “eyes.” A mussel extends this “living lure” outside its shell, where it attracts fish, just like an angler’s lure cast on a line. As a fish bites at the “lure” the mussel ejects thousands of larval mussels which attach to the fish’s red gill rakers. The fish then moves upstream (these interactions are often timed to coincide with fish spawning runs), and the larval mussels drop off to begin their life on the stream bottom. Fish, then, unwittingly help to distribute beneficial mussels throughout the stream.

Raising mussels is intricate work. Ray and his staff devised ingenuous, but economical, methods for nurturing the tiny-a third the size of a grain of salt-mussel larvae toward maturity.

The entire operation at Union City Aquatic Conservation Center is self-contained, with re-circulating water that’s disinfected before it leaves the site to protect the local watershed from any pathogens that could grow in a laboratory setting.

Ray said his team will continue re-stocking Dunkard Creek with mussels as long as they have funding, but settlement funds are limited. State Wildlife Grants from the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to enable states to conserve and restore native species have been suspended by the Trump administration.

A Greene County asset, Dunkard Creek is on the mend. Time will tell if the healing can continue.