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Paper short abstract:

This paper tracks how methods and devices for biomonitoring chemical environments using mollusk behavior were developed using dreissenid mussels —icons of biological invasion— after the 1970s. Mussel-monitoring’s intimacies usefully refigure multispecies relations athwart invasion discourses.

Paper long abstract:

Zebra mussels (Dreissena spp.) are small, gregarious bivalve mollusks that have, in the past few decades, become discursive icons of biological invasion. Although biological invasion has been problematized across the environmental humanities, zebra mussels have received little critical attention. Due to the renewal of nativist politics combined with enhanced species detection technologies, zebra mussels are increasingly engaged with and reconfigured. Drawing from methods in the history of science and critical science studies, I focus on one particular technoscientific engagement with these controversial mollusks — their use as biomonitoring sentinel technologies. After the 1970s, freshwater pollution fueled fears of potable water contamination and environmental degradation. Costly and imprecise physical-chemical monitoring necessitated the innovation of biological methods for detecting chemical contamination. Mussel enrolled in monitoring systems proved sensitive to broad varieties of contaminants at low doses, and displayed easily interpretable stress behaviors. Focusing especially on one system, the Dreissena-monitor, this paper tracks how dreissenids and other mussels became entangled with projects of active and passive biomonitoring. Practices of mussel-monitoring were developed in local Dutch and German contexts before being circulated among diverse global sites over the late-20th century, even motivating a complex aspirational project of worldwide passive mussel-monitoring. As biomonitors, mussels like dreissenids augment human sensation of chemical environments and, in the process, suffuse our relations with shared environments with varied hopes and anxieties. And, remade in these technoscientific frames, dreissenids join other organisms in provoking a broad vision of biological invasion by tracking shifting expectations of multispecies and other more-than-human relations.