{"id":1134,"date":"2026-07-19T19:10:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T19:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2026-07-19T19:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T19:10:14","slug":"alabama-yes-alabama-is-an-epic-biodiversity-hotspot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=1134","title":{"rendered":"Alabama (Yes, Alabama!) Is an Epic Biodiversity Hotspot"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story was originally published by\u00a0<\/em>Vox\u00a0and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0<\/em>Climate Desk\u00a0collaboration.<\/em><\/p>

Read more What Do We Really Know About the Microplastics Building Up Inside Us?<\/a><\/p>\n

On a sweltering<\/span> June afternoon, I stood in what was essentially a roadside ditch. Sandwiched between a four-lane highway and the parking lot of a faith-based recreation center near Birmingham, Alabama, the ditch was filled with cool, flowing water, a bit of trash, and, apparently, some highly endangered fish.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Drummond, a biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, stretched out a sheet of netting held between two poles, while his colleague kicked water into it.<\/p>\n

After a minute or so, we looked inside the netting. There were clumps of leaves and twigs, a few black salamanders, and a crayfish with its pincers held up, ready to fight. The biologists unceremoniously tossed them aside. They were more interested in a handful of fish that were wiggling around in the netting, each no larger than a pinky finger.<\/p>\n

Chris Haynes, a state fisheries biologist, popped the small fish into a container of clear water, revealing their colors: bright reds and muted shades of orange, blue, and yellow.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got all three!\u201d said Drummond, who had a beard and tattoos on his arms.<\/p>\n

The fish were darters\u2014slender, freshwater fish, known for their vibrant colors. And in that one go, the biologists had caught all three species that reside here: the watercress, rush, and vermilion darters. Each one is federally endangered, the strongest form of protection afforded to species in the United States.<\/p>\n

Alabama is well known for college football, Southern hospitality, and conservative politics. But as I learned over a recent week in June, it\u2019s also an epic biodiversity hotspot, especially in the aquatic realm. Remarkably, Alabama\u2014which has more than 130,000 miles of rivers and streams\u2014is home to more species of turtles, freshwater fish, snails, crayfish, and freshwater mussels than any other state in the country.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an unexpected epicenter of endangered species, too\u2014those that are at risk of extinction and listed under the Endangered Species Act. According to a Vox<\/em> analysis of government data, Alabama has more federally endangered and threatened animal species than any other state aside from California, which is three times larger by area. Endangered species are so common here that you can find them in a ditch on the side of the road.This, of course, is an unwanted distinction. What makes it even more problematic is that Alabama doesn\u2019t have enough money to help these animals that are most at risk.<\/p>\n

Alabama is an extreme example of a challenge facing many states: Much of the funding available to protect wild animals is not based on how threatened those species are. Funding streams, instead, prioritize species that people hunt or fish, known as game, and those that live in the most populous and largest states.<\/p>\n

This is an acute issue in places like Alabama that are not especially large or populous but full of imperiled species. And while those animals are vital to the state\u2019s rivers and recreation industry, they also tend to be small, out of sight, and generally short on charisma\u2014unlike, say, wolves, panthers, or whales. That makes projects to help them an even harder sell for limited environmental dollars.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s to say nothing of the state\u2019s politics. Alabama is one of the country\u2019s\u00a0most conservative states, and Republicans have earned a reputation for\u00a0opposing environmental protections. In 2022, the state\u2019s Republican congressional representatives all voted against\u00a0a nonpartisan bill\u00a0that would have likely quintupled funding for Alabama\u2019s nongame species\u2014like the endangered darters I saw in the roadside stream\u2014had it not stalled out before passing the Senate. Some of Alabama\u2019s congressional Republicans have also thrown support behind\u00a0projects\u00a0that may endanger even more species.<\/p>\n

While a close look at Alabama reveals that wildlife support systems are biased against certain species and regions, it also highlights the immense power that a dedicated few human champions can have. During my trip, I met scientists who are working hard to help the state\u2019s obscure endangered species, from mussels to snails, with whatever resources they can cobble together. They convinced me that these animals are, in fact, quite charismatic. And why, no matter our political tilts, we should rally to keep them here on Earth.<\/p>\n

A good rule<\/span> of thumb is that if you come across a refrigerator while visiting a biology lab, you should look inside of it. This rule served me well at the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center (AABC), a state-run facility about an hour from Tuscaloosa. In two fridges I found plastic containers full of pregnant freshwater mussels.<\/p>\n

AABC is primarily a nursery for endangered mussels. A collection of several old buildings just off a rural highway, the facility collects pregnant adults, raises their babies, and then releases them months later in streams to help restore their wild populations.<\/p>\n

Mussels are essentially nature\u2019s Brita filters. A single large mussel can filter as much as a liter of water an hour, removing bacteria, algae, and other potentially harmful particles, said Carla Atkinson, a mussel researcher at the University of Alabama. And a healthy stream can have 50 mussels in a single pillow-size patch, she said. Abundant mussel populations can save cities money on water filtration and make rivers more swimmable for people and more habitable for other species.<\/p>\n

Alabama used to have more than 180 species of freshwater mussels, says Paul Johnson, a state biologist who runs AABC. Two dozen of them have already gone extinct, he said. Close to 70 of those that remain are federally endangered or threatened, largely as a result of dams and water pollution, and AABC is currently working to restore about 15 of them.<\/p>\n

You might think raising animals that resemble rocks is easy, but it very much is not. And the reason why is best explained by what is, without question, the most exciting thing to know about these animals.<\/p>\n

Mussels have a \u201cfoot\u201d that helps them burrow, but they can\u2019t easily travel. That makes it hard for them to colonize new habitats and, in turn, survive changing environmental conditions. But over millions of years, they evolved a hack: They hitch a ride on fish. Or rather, their babies do. Larval mussels, known as glochidia, spend their first few weeks of life attached to the gills of fish, before dropping off elsewhere in the riverbed to begin a largely sedentary lifestyle in a new place.<\/p>\n

The real ingenuity is in how those glochidia get onto fish in the first place. Essentially, mussels pretend to be fish food to lure them in. Some females wave around a fleshy part of their body so it looks like a swimming minnow. Others release into the water packets of glochidia that have evolved to look like insect larvae. When fish go in for a bite, they get a face full of baby mussels that soon after attach to their gills, like real-life xenomorphs.<\/p>\n

These lures are surprisingly convincing. One of the species found here, known as the Southern pocketbook mussel, for example, uses its fleshy mantle to mimic a bait fish.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a federally threatened Alabama mussel, the orangenacre mucket, clumps its glochidia together in two fish-shaped masses, which it tethers to its body with a mucous strand. This creates the illusion of free swimming fish. When a fish bites the lure, the clump ruptures and the babies get sucked into the fish\u2019s mouth and over its gills.<\/p>\n

My favorite examples come from mussels in the genus Epioblasma<\/em>, all of which are endangered. They leave their shells ajar, and produce a lure that mimics some kind of fish food, like crayfish eggs or larvae. When hungry fish poke their heads inside, the mussels snap shut like a Venus flytrap\u2014and blast the fish in the face with babies. After this abrupt encounter, the fish are released to go on their way with their new stowaways.<\/p>\n

Different kinds of mussels typically rely on different \u201chost\u201d fish. And that brings us back to one of the challenges of running a mussel nursery; not only do you need pregnant mussels, you also need lots of fish.<\/p>\n

To rear these mussels in captivity, scientists first find and collect pregnant, or \u201cgravid,\u201d mussels from the wild and store them in refrigerators. The cold keeps the animals pregnant for longer. Then they extract the glochidia manually and add them to a container with the proper host fish. Those fish get \u201cinfected\u201d in a matter of minutes, at which point the fish are moved into tanks in a nearby room. Weeks later, nearly invisible mussels drop off the fish and fall to the bottom of those tanks, where they\u2019re collected by scientists. From there, the young mussels grow in plastic buckets indoors and, once they\u2019re a bit bigger, in plastic buckets outdoors\u2014in a nearby well-fed pond.<\/p>\n

I visited the pond one sunny afternoon with Johnson, the AABC supervisor, who wore a ball cap and glasses. Johnson is self-deprecating and often finishes his sentences with a bout of disarming, wheezy laughter. A Kentucky native with an accent to match, he\u2019s been working with endangered species for more than 30 years.<\/p>\n

A wooden dock fitted with pipes and tubes extended out onto the pond. Submerged in the clear water around it were about 80 weighted buckets full of mussels. The tubes, I learned, move air through the lids of the buckets and\u2014thanks to some confusing physics\u2014help cycle water through them, mimicking a stream. It looked and sounded like the water around the dock was boiling.<\/p>\n

Lilliputs are\u00a0, but they nearly went extinct in the mid-1900s as the US government turned rivers into channels, farmland spread, and cities and suburbs expanded. \u201cThere are more of these in this bucket than there are in museum collections around the world,\u201d Johnson said, to emphasize how rare they are.<\/p>

Read more Police Keep Losing Their Jobs For Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Buntin, a state biologist at AABC, pulled up another bucket. This one was filled with hundreds of two slightly larger species: the Alabama rainbow and Coosa moccasinshell. \u201cThat is absolutely one of the rarest species in the United States,\u201d Johnson said of the moccasinshell, which was pointy and brown. I had now seen more moccasinshell mussels than all but a handful of people in the world, Buntin told me.<\/p>\n

You might imagine that a facility managing hundreds of some of the nation\u2019s most endangered species would have state-of-the-art technology, a large team, advanced security, and a carefully orchestrated media presence. AABC has none of those things. Most of the technology is DIY\u2014Tupperware containers in refrigerators, plastic buckets with holes cut into them. AABC has only four full-time employees. The buildings are old and falling apart. \u201cIt\u2019s low budget,\u201d Buntin said with a snicker.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s partly out of choice, Johnson said. Simple, homemade systems are easier to fix if they break. But it\u2019s also because the facility\u2014like so many state conservation efforts across the country\u2014is wildly underfunded for the number of species it is charged with bringing back from the brink of extinction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the most species and the fewest dollars,\u201d Johnson said of Alabama, adding, sarcastically: \u201cThat makes a lot of sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The headwinds facing<\/span> efforts like this begin far upstream. Most funding for state wildlife agencies\u2014which oversee the bulk of the country\u2019s conservation, including endangered and threatened species\u2014actually comes from selling hunting and fishing licenses, along with federal\u00a0excise taxes on guns, ammo, and\u00a0fishing gear.<\/p>\n

This setup not only\u00a0encourages states to promote gun use\u00a0but also to spend those funds on managing animals that people like to hunt and fish. In fact, some of that money is legally restricted to programs that support birds, mammals, and sport fish. And that, of course, does not include many of the nation\u2019s endangered species\u2014including most of those in Alabama.<\/p>\n

Just look at the roughly $450 million annual budget for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which manages parks, hunting,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0conservation. Of that, only about 1 percent goes toward helping nongame species, including mussels, crayfish, snails, and many endangered fish, according to Amy Silvano, who leads non-game efforts at the department. AABC is a key part of the agency\u2019s nongame division and receives a total average annual budget of just $750,000, Silvano said.<\/p>\n

While funding for nongame species is a challenge nationwide, Alabama is, in some ways, also uniquely ill-positioned. It has a human population of about 5 million, and it ranks in the bottom half of all US states by area. That matters, because much of the limited federal money that\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>made available for at-risk animal species is allocated based on a state\u2019s geographic size and human population\u2014not on how many endangered or threatened species it has. Larger and more populous states like New York and Illinois receive more funding to protect endangered species than Alabama does. Even though they have far fewer of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe states with the greatest biodiversity challenges aren\u2019t necessarily the states receiving funding proportional to those challenges,\u201d said Michelle Lute, executive director of the advocacy group Wildlife for All.<\/p>\n

These problems are not unfixable. A few years ago, the House voted on the\u00a0Recovering America\u2019s Wildlife Act, which would have dispersed $1.3 billion across all US states to protect their imperiled species, including some\u00a0\u00a0for Alabama. Though Republicans from Alabama voted against it, the bill passed the House and was widely considered nonpartisan. It later stalled in the Senate and has yet to become law, because lawmakers couldn\u2019t agree on how to pay for it.<\/p>\n

Alabama has actually had more success in boosting funding for threatened species at the state level. The Republican-dominated legislature recently approved $2 million for the state\u2019s threatened species from its general fund. Some of that money is going toward fixing up aging infrastructure at AABC.<\/p>\n

Chris Oberholster helped lobby for those state funds while he was working in external affairs for the Nature Conservancy, a large environmental nonprofit. Oberholster, now director of philanthropy at another green group, said one key to garnering support for conservation in Alabama has been framing it as a boon for outdoor recreation, such as by maintaining the natural beauty of lakes and streams through restoring mussels.<\/p>\n

Preserving the state\u2019s unique ecological heritage has also been a selling point for conservation, he said\u2014many of these aquatic species are found only in Alabama, and that makes people want to help save them.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a lesson here, it is perhaps an obvious one: You can find support, and even cash, for wildlife conservation everywhere, as long as you connect the benefits of that work to the values of people in the local community.<\/p>\n

On another muggy<\/span> afternoon, I joined Atkinson, the University of Alabama researcher, in a shallow stream east of Tuscaloosa. She shuffled around, careful with each step, holding in her hands what looked like a metal detector\u2014a pole connected to a ring-shaped base, which she kept submerged underwater.<\/p>\n

Despite its resource constraints, AABC has released roughly 300,000 mussels across more than a dozen species in Alabama\u2019s rivers over the last 15 years. Some reintroduced populations are now breeding on their own, Johnson said. In fact, AABC has been successful enough in raising and releasing one particular species\u2014the pale lilliput, the ones that look like golden pumpkin seeds\u2014that it may soon be eligible for delisting under the Endangered Species Act, meaning it would no longer be considered endangered.<\/p>\n

Two other species are on their way to getting off the list, too, Johnson said, largely owing to AABC\u2019s restoration work. With more resources the center could do more, said Johnson, who suggested they would likely restore more mussels and other aquatic species too, including fish and crayfish. \u201cWe can expand what we\u2019re doing pretty easily,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n

After several minutes canvassing the streambed with the PIT-tag reader, Atkinson got a ping. A Coosa moccasinshell was, apparently, right by her feet.<\/p>\n

I thought she\u2019d simply reach into the water and grab the thing. She had no such luck. Not only do mussels look like every other rock on the bottom, but they can also burrow into the riverbed, making them hard to find, even with a literal mussel detector.<\/p>\n

Atkinson threw on a mask and snorkel and plunged her head underwater. A few minutes later, she popped up, smiling, with a shiny brown lump in her hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s gratifying to see that they\u2019re still persisting and that we chose the right habitat,\u201d said Johnson, who had been busy collecting pea-size snails to show me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be the first to admit that this creature, as it appeared before me, was not so thrilling to look at. It was not cute or colorful. And aside from an almost imperceptible movement of its shell, it offered little proof of life.<\/p>\n

Then I thought about what this one animal does. How it thoughtlessly filters the water just by existing, making it livable for everything else, at no cost to us. How it mimics fish food, despite having no brain or true eyes, a trick forged by millions of years of evolution. How it can help stabilize the riverbed and minimize erosion by anchoring itself to the bottom.<\/p>\n

The abundant wildlife in Alabama might not be charismatic in a traditional sense, but there\u2019s an understated impressiveness to it. The fish in the ditch by the highway evolved to live in isolated springs and are still persisting, if barely, in the middle of a sprawling city that sprung up around them. Some crayfish\u2014there are about 100 species in Alabama, many of which are imperiled\u2014appear to engineer ventilation systems that bring fresh air into their underground burrows.<\/p>\n

Before leaving Alabama, I drove south to a bog about 45 minutes from Mobile. It was spectacular. The ground was blanketed by carnivorous pitcher plants and crayfish burrows. The crayfish here are \u201cprimary burrowers,\u201d Brian Helms, a researcher who studies these animals at Alabama\u2019s Troy University, told me, as we walked through the bog. Although they breathe with gills, like fish, they live on land, he said. They just dig down deep enough to reach the water table.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s spots like this that represent the unique environmental heritage that Oberholster was talking about. Though often hidden, they have real value. And if more people, and especially lawmakers, don\u2019t see that, the animals within them may not be around for much longer.<\/p>

Read more Assault, Misogyny, Verbal Threats: Records Detail New Allegations Against Rep. Max Miller<\/a><\/p>\n

Melissa Hirsch contributed reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And it\u2019s struggling to protect species found nowhere else on Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nAlabama (Yes, Alabama!) Is an Epic Biodiversity Hotspot - Moving and Mortgage Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=1134\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Alabama (Yes, Alabama!) 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