Polish city is using mussels to monitor water quality (2020)
18 comments
·February 3, 2025jwr
That's not new, and it isn't even the only city doing this, Warsaw has been doing it for a long time now: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wild-life-excerpt-wate...
M4v3R
Can confirm, I live in a much smaller city and we do have a water treatment and monitoring plant that does the same.
wwarek
Covered nicely by Tom Scott some time ago: https://youtu.be/i0RkEs3Xwf0
klausa
Weirdly enough that's about a completely different water treatment plant in a different part of the country.
jakozaur
Several Polish cities got that systems. It may sound unusual, but it is pragmatic system.
Poland during cold war was suppose to be battleground and protecting water supply is hard. Many traditional systems have some gaps.
hyperman1
The same is done for detecting water quality in de Scheldt river in Belgium and the Netherlands.
NaOH
(2020)
Similarly, from 2019, Check Out These Mussels: Minneapolis Using Mollusks To Monitor Water Quality:
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/mussels-helping-monit...
tornadofart
shell scripting taken to a new level
veunes
Yet it’s always cool to see nature and tech blending like this.
jakozaur
Even the most ambitious software systems often are stitched by a shell scripts. It is nice to learn that it is also the for water supply.
veunes
What happens if pollutants build up slowly, rather than in a sudden spike that causes the mussels to close?
praptak
Then they can be detected by slower and more precise methods like periodically analyzing the samples in a traditional lab.
WickedMo
They do a very similar thing in the Netherlands by monitoring water flea populations.
null
andrewstuart
I knew a veterinarian who never ate anything like mussels.
Asked why, he said "I know what they eat."
veunes
Mussels are basically living water filters
null
I recently learned about a similar use of animals for assisting humans:
In about 1915, he tried a more natural approach to control the street lighting in Brightwater – chicken power. They didn't have time switches in those days, so he connected a switch to the perches in his chicken house. When the chickens started to roost at night the weight would turn the lighting on and in the morning when they got down off their perches, the spring switch would turn the generator and lighting off.
Via: https://www.theprow.org.nz/people/robert-ellis/