Kentucky has many freshwater sources, including a vast collection of rivers.

But do you know about the animals that keep them all clean?

More than 100 species of mussels live in our waters.

But as their population declines, experts with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife are working to save them.

These freshwater mussels are very vital to our ecosystems.

They're their filter feeders.

They basically remove all the stuff that's in the water that can hurt us, like bacteria, things that discolor the water.

They remove that.

We monitor mussel populations all over the state.

We have every five years, we go out and do this, what we call quantitative, where where we put these grids down on the bottom of the river, and we take every muscle out of this little square area, Kalamazoo Avenue.

And then we monitor the populations over time.

And, so what we've seen in the last 4 or 5 years or so, since I've been working here, we've seen several places that decline an alarming rate that we're not really sure that some of it's habitat, some of it some species, some of it's pollution, overpopulation from people.

So, people like to harness the power of water by putting a dam in to create electricity.

That changes a river to a lake.

And freshwater mussels typically more, more abundant in the rivers.

So when we do that, that changes the habitat.

But not only to change the habitat to habitat for fish and mussels are connected to fish because their life cycle depends on a host fish.

So that means that they, freshwater mussel like this, this spike will have a once all kind of garden source of salt.

These salt, thousands of them.

And they release those into the water, and they have to come in contact with their host.

This fish not in space.

So once they, attach to the fish's gills, typically they live on there for 2 or 3 weeks, and then they'll eventually drop off of the fish and start their life as a juvenile mussel takes them 3 to 5 years, they'll start reproducing, and then they start to cycle over, and then they can live anywhere from 50 to 100 years, depending on the species.

But anyway, as a result, when you change, lake a river to a lake by putting a dam on it, for instance.

Then you change the fish species that live there.

You get more lake species than you do river species.

So then the mussel farm changes, sometimes eliminating the species that used to be there.

Fairly common.

Because it's hosted.

This is gone.

But there's some places where the populations seem to be reversing and going in the right direction as far as, so the population is increasing.

We've seen the species that hasn't shown up for 20 years of sudden starts showing up again.

And so that's a good thing that we're seeing some positives.

And I think we're contributing to that a little bit.

We're we're taking an animal.

There's 15 or 20 left in a river system and we're raising hundreds of thousands of.

So why.

So why is mussel so important in Kentucky?

Because, there's only, so many species in the world, and we have the most we have over 30 something percent of the world's fauna here in the southeastern United States.

So we're the rich mussel diversity area in the world.

But what we want to see, we want to see lots of numbers, lots of species, and a lot of rare animals that are doing well and certain places.

That's a good sign for us.

And when we see that we know the health of that river, it's much better.

Kentucky has more than 100 species of mussels, and 29 of them right now are threatened or endangered.