[HN Gopher] Polish city is using mussels to monitor water qualit...
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Polish city is using mussels to monitor water quality (2020)
Author : gscott
Score : 191 points
Date : 2025-02-03 04:53 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.awa.asn.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.awa.asn.au)
| NaOH wrote:
| (2020)
|
| Similarly, from 2019, _Check Out These Mussels: Minneapolis Using
| Mollusks To Monitor Water Quality_ :
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/mussels-helping-monit...
| wwarek wrote:
| Covered nicely by Tom Scott some time ago:
| https://youtu.be/i0RkEs3Xwf0
| klausa wrote:
| Weirdly enough that's about a completely different water
| treatment plant in a different part of the country.
| jakozaur wrote:
| 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.
| jf wrote:
| 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/
| gambiting wrote:
| Some designs for nuclear bombs included live chickens which
| would produce enough heat to keep the electronics active:
|
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3588465.stm
| lukan wrote:
| That is one of the most weirdest (and messed up) thing I have
| read in a while.
|
| And they say it is not a fools day story despite it surfaced
| on 1.April, but I am not convinced.
|
| But they also don't say how serious that plan was. It was
| never more than a theoretical concept it seems, after all.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There was a fringe-y program in WW2 run by Skinner to try
| to train pigeons to act as primitive guidance computers for
| glide bombs. It only got minor funding and AFAIK was never
| tested with actual birds in actual bombs but they were able
| to train the birds and it seems like it could have worked.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
| benjiro wrote:
| Let me trump that with the bat (fire)bomb!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
| grvbck wrote:
| Also, trojan rats:
|
| > During WWII, British Special Forces considered stuffing
| dead rats with explosives and dispersing them over
| Germany. They hoped that the Germans would gather the
| rats and dispose of them in industrial furnaces,
| producing tremendous explosions that would cause
| catastrophic boiler failures.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortont
| ayl...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Which inadvertently proved it's own effectiveness when
| some of the buildings at the base being used for testing
| were burnt down because some bats flew outside the
| intended test range and roosted in random buildings.
| Pretty grizzly story and I'm glad it didn't go to wide
| spread adoption but that part has always been hilarious
| to me.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I've always figured the birds would probably lose focus
| once in freefall. They'd surely know they were.
| shaftway wrote:
| Fun fact, this is the same Skinner that eventually wrote
| the book on modern autism treatment, aka Applied Behavior
| Analysis.
| BJones12 wrote:
| Birds and bombs are a popular combination:
|
| https://www.military-history.org/feature/pigeon-guided-
| missi...
| p3rls wrote:
| It's interesting how we're sorta circling back to these
| concepts with drones today
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
| perihelions wrote:
| Bats too
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
|
| - _" Tests were used to determine how much napalm an
| individual bat could carry, determining that a 14 g (0.5
| oz) bat could carry a payload of 15-18 g (0.53-0.63
| oz)..."_
|
| Similar ideas were (perhaps apocryphally) used in the
| medieval ages,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev#Drevlian_Uprisin
| g ( _" Olga_of_Kiev#Drevlian_Uprising"_)
|
| - _" Olga then instructed her army to attach a piece of
| sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth to each bird. At
| nightfall, Olga told her soldiers to set the pieces aflame
| and release the birds. They returned to their nests within
| the city, which subsequently set the city ablaze. As the
| Primary Chronicle tells it: "There was not a house that was
| not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the
| flames, because all the houses caught fire at once."[22]"_
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Thinking about it, nearly everything about computing is
| fundamentally about how to translate between analog and
| digital.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sounds like bullshit. Time switches would be trivial as long as
| you had a clock, and clocks existed long before electricity.
| The idea that rigging a switch on a perch in a chicken coop
| would be easier or more effective than using a clock seems
| ridiculous.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| "But I don't want to adjust/wind/sync the clock as the days
| get shorter and longer!"
| sfink wrote:
| Time switches can only roughly accommodate the changing time
| of dusk and dawn, and can't handle dark weather at all. Said
| otherwise: if you're trying to approximate a light sensor, a
| clock is a worse approximation than a live chicken.
|
| Or to give a specific counterexample to "The idea that [a
| chicken could be] more effective than using a clock seems
| ridiculous": during a solar eclipse, a chicken may go in to
| roost, but it would have to be a pretty sophisticated (or
| broken) clock to handle that case. (I'm not saying that
| solving for the solar eclipse case is necessary or useful,
| just that it demonstrates the point.)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| At that point, look out the window and flip the switch
| yourself. Then you don't have to worry about whether the
| clock is wound, the chicken is sick or dead, or any other
| anomalies
| ilinx wrote:
| Presumably the consensus of a number of chickens could be
| more consistent than one person (who could get sick or
| forget).
| aeturnum wrote:
| I believe it's still the case that the system where TSA swabs
| things and puts those swabs into a detector uses live bees in
| cartridges to sense explosives[1]
|
| [1] https://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/new-device-uses-
| sni...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I knew a veterinarian who never ate anything like mussels.
|
| Asked why, he said "I know what they eat."
| veunes wrote:
| Mussels are basically living water filters
| Mistletoe wrote:
| A weird approach to bioaccumulation which gets worse the higher
| in trophic level you go. Things like clams and sardines have
| the lowest levels of mercury etc. Swordfish and big tuna the
| worst.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Historically, the mussels harvested for eating have mostly
| lived very near the shoreline, and in areas with higher-
| density human populations. So their diets contained
| enormously higher concentrations of civilization's myriad
| water pollutants, compared to big deep-water fish.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I don't know if that is right.
|
| https://onnalomd.com/blog/fish-mercury-pcb-levels
|
| Mussels PCBs is 0.8-7 ng/g and albacore tuna is 100.
| Mercury looks similar. I do notice that sardines seem
| higher in PCBs than I would have expected but their mercury
| is low.
| tornadofart wrote:
| shell scripting taken to a new level
| jakozaur wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes, it's common to pipe through a shell.
| veunes wrote:
| Yet it's always cool to see nature and tech blending like this.
| jwr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can confirm, I live in a much smaller city and we do have a
| water treatment and monitoring plant that does the same.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| you are correct but the article you cite seems to be dated
| 2024...
|
| AFAIK its a Belgian-Polish research activity at least since
| 2006, potentially other places have done this earlier:
|
| https://www.gva.be/cnt/oid417904
|
| Before this ozone peaks were being detected with clovers and
| gladiola's...
| veunes wrote:
| What happens if pollutants build up slowly, rather than in a
| sudden spike that causes the mussels to close?
| praptak wrote:
| Then they can be detected by slower and more precise methods
| like periodically analyzing the samples in a traditional lab.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| The same is done for detecting water quality in de Scheldt river
| in Belgium and the Netherlands.
| WickedMo wrote:
| They do a very similar thing in the Netherlands by monitoring
| water flea populations.
| edwinjm wrote:
| The Dutch do it quite some time as well.
|
| Video (in Dutch, but intersting to see)
|
| https://www.rtvnoord.nl/video/863704/mosselmonitor-gaat-gron...
| RugnirViking wrote:
| Used to be good friends with a polish girl whose father worked on
| this. I was amazed but she really considered it no big deal.
| n0rdy wrote:
| It's quite a creative approach. I have a question about it,
| though, as the person whose expertise is far from biology: how
| much time does it take for the species to adapt / evolve under
| the new reality?
|
| For example, the city I live in has access to the sea. Which
| means that there are plenty of seagulls and another type of bird
| that looks similar but has a slightly larger size (not sure about
| its name). However, I can observe that many of them are searching
| for food not in the sea, but rather in the trash bins quite far
| from the sea, in front of McDonald's and other fast food places,
| where they can steal the food from the hand of the person leaving
| the building.
|
| This gives me a hint that their behavior changed quite a lot due
| to the new conditions they live in. Is the same possible with the
| mussels that the "mussels are well known for clamping their
| shells shut when water quality is poor" fact might change within
| a short time? Or does it take generations to evolve like that?
| sznio wrote:
| You seem to be conflating evolution with learning. Seagulls
| didn't evolve to steal from trashcans, they learned to.
|
| As for the main point of your question: the clams are replaced
| every so often, so they won't end up getting used to the city
| water and stop serving as a marker.
| n0rdy wrote:
| Got it, learning is something that can be acquired relatively
| quickly, while evolving needs generations. Thanks for the
| explanation.
| grvbck wrote:
| Valid question though, and the answer to what I think you
| wanted to know is >3 months:
|
| > the clams are "paid back after three months of work by
| releasing them to a place from which they will never be
| caught again". [---] this is done because they eventually
| become resistant to contamination in the water.
|
| https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/poznan-mussel-water-
| plant...
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| When I lived in Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast you could always
| tell a newcomer to the town because they'd eat outside without
| aerial cover. The herring gulls there are pterodactyl-like,
| massive and always watching for the slightest opportunity to
| fill their beaks. They're clever birds too, I've seem them work
| cooperatively to deprive some poor fresher of their lunch and
| hawks had little success in driving them away. I've actually
| come to miss them a bit having moved inland, I'm moving back to
| a city by the sea this year and I wonder how long that will
| last!
|
| Depending on where you are, you may be thinking of the great
| black-backed gull.
| n0rdy wrote:
| I've just googled, and herring gulls are indeed the birds I
| was referring to here in Norway, good catch. We have the
| same, actually, when tourists/guests of the city are easier
| targets. A few times I had to "defend" (mostly, by hiding) my
| lunch sandwich or bun as well, if I wanted to eat somewhere
| with a view over the sea. However, even a few kilometers from
| the sea, they can still be on a "hunt". Very interesting
| creatures!
| incontrol wrote:
| I believe mussels are now (2025) protecting more cities.
|
| What is cool about Warsaw is the TAWARA-RTM (TAp WAter
| RAdioactivity Real Time Monitor.
|
| "Warsaw as the first city in the world is protected by a
| comprehensive system that is capable to monitor in real-time
| radioactivity of municipal water and by an innovative
| spectroscopy system capable to identify any detected
| contaminants"
|
| https://www.ncbj.gov.pl/en/aktualnosci/state-art-system-moni...
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Interesting and surprising, to see that they have English
| versions online.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Almost all(i haven't checked them all myself) government
| sites in Poland have both Polish and English versions.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| It's likely already planned, but testing for radioactivity in
| wastewater too would likely detect any released radioactive
| material that didn't impact tap water.
| skirge wrote:
| "forces of nature in the service of man" - classic polish comedy
| ;)
| dorfsmay wrote:
| An article (in French) published this morning about the city of
| Paris monitoring the Seine River and just discovered DNA of three
| endengered mussel species. They also mention that there are ten
| times the number of fish species compared to 1960.
|
| https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-billet-vert/a-pa...
| philipov wrote:
| They missed a chance to name the research program Mussel Training
| jsbg wrote:
| Tangentially-related is the use of oysters to clean waterways:
| https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/project/eutrophication-oyste...
| bell-cot wrote:
| Seems odd that nobody has mentioned "canary in coal mine", or the
| general case:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species
| sfink wrote:
| Some form of this is quite common. My town's water treatment
| plant uses fish. They have all of their automatic monitoring
| things, but they also have a school of fish in the water coming
| out of the last stage of the plant, just before releasing it.
| They keep an eye on the fish. If they die, they know there's a
| problem and shut things down.
|
| On a tour, I asked the obvious question: isn't that a little
| late? By the time the fish are dead, haven't you released a large
| quantity of hazardous water? The response was basically a shrug
| and "it's better than nothing".
|
| I think I like the Polish approach better.
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