If you’re in Sioux Falls tomorrow, feel free to come to my TEDx talk! I’ll be speaking about my research over the last decade on the native freshwater mussels of our rivers, why they’re important for making clean water, and what we can do to restore them.

Mussels have been called “the livers of the rivers.” They can clean 25 gallons of water a day. They also have complicated reproductive lives, and it was easy for us to disrupt them. Restoring their ability to reproduce will take work, and it will require us to ask better questions.

Come tomorrow and I’ll tell you what questions we should be asking, and how to begin to answer them together.

Two open native freshwater mussel shells lie on a sandy and pebbled surface, each containing small amounts of sand and pebbles.