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Quoting "James W. Wolford" <jimwolford@eastlink.ca>:
>> MARCH 12, 2013 - Gisela Westphalen called to say she did a walk
>> today along the Gaspereau Canal, just across the road from the
>> White Rock Power House. The water level was down a foot or so, and
>> on both sides of the canal there were lots of opened shells of
>> freshwater mussels. And she wondered what has caused the mussel
>> mortalities. I said my guess was that muskrats had preyed on those
>> mussels, but I wondered if there were other possibilities, like
>> raccoons or mink or otter?
* all of the above, probably (in my opinion) also including Beavers.
The question of which predators is hard to address since it takes the
predator a minute to do the deed, but the shell can remain in place
for a decade as evidence of the meal. in my opinion, Muskrats make
piles of shells that have been brought out to the bank to gape before
being opened; Beavers tend to open shells under ice in the winter;
Otters tend to munch shells on rocks along the shore; Raccoons dig up
mussels stranded by low water levels. Mink, I have no opinion about,
but they'd probably open smaller shells than Otters, again by crunching.
A bagful of the shells should be gotten to a museum or to us, to
preserve a sample of the shell morphology of the populations at that
site at that time - http://pinicola.ca/unio/
fred.
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills - http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
South Nation Basin Art & Science Book
http://pinicola.ca/books/SNR_book.htm
RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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