Monitoring program assesses legacy contaminants in dreissenid mussels, indicating water pollution levels.
In 2022, the National Mussel Watch Program (MWP) conducted an assessment of the presence, distribution, and magnitude of legacy organic contaminants in dreissenid mussels (zebra/quagga; Dreissena spp.) from the Laurentian Great Lakes. To achieve this, the MWP employed a sentinel-based monitoring approach by collecting and analyzing dreissenid mussels as surrogates for assessing water pollutant levels in the Great Lakes. Mussels and oysters are sessile organisms that filter and accumulate particles from water; therefore, measuring contaminant levels in their tissue is a good indicator of local chemical contamination. Mussel tissue samples from 66 monitoring sites within the Great Lakes Basin were analyzed in this study. In 2022, tissue samples were analyzed for nine legacy compound groups including butyltins, chlordanes, chlorobenzenes, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDTs), dieldrins, endosulfans, hexachlorocyclohexane (HCHs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), in addition to 2 individual contaminants, chlorpyrifos and mirex.
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Edwards et al. (2025) studied this question.
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