TexasHornshell_HarvestLimits_Howells_Bob_KerrvilleTX_15January2024_Reel4186.mp3

Bob Howells [00:00:00] From the onset of work with freshwater mussels, it was the commercial harvest that drew Parks and Wildlife into it, where I worked.

Bob Howells [00:00:08] There was an old freshwater mussel license on the books from so many decades ago nobody knew who had done it or why. It existed, was all.

Bob Howells [00:00:19] But it was just a license. It didn't differentiate between residents and nonresidents, and shell buyers and shell harvesters and that sort of thing.

Bob Howells [00:00:28] So, one of the things I had to do was create new definitions for mussel licenses. This would eventually be passed to the Texas Legislature and licenses are passed there. I would draft, here's what we need, send it to my superiors in Austin, they would take it to the Legislature. So, we got new licenses passed.

Bob Howells [00:00:50] At the same time, we needed harvest regulations. To do this, one of the things is to look at the harvest regulations and types of licenses that were in other states where harvest had been going on for years, and style what we'd done there.

Bob Howells [00:01:06] One of the things that we would do, for example, is put minimum harvest sizes on. Before you harvest an animal, you'd like to see it grow up, mature, and reproduce. If you harvest them before they reproduce, pretty soon you don't have anything left to harvest.

Bob Howells [00:01:24] So, with a lot of the commercials, literally all of the commercial shell species, they were found in other states and we could look and see that, for example, washboard mussels were a very popular mussel. They get about twelve inches long and weigh about four pounds. They need to be at least four inches in shell height to reproduce. So, you set a minimum size: you got to be at least four inches. If you're smaller than that, you got to let it go.

Bob Howells [00:01:54] And so, we had sizes for all of our commercial shell species. We had the same commercial-interest species everybody else did.

Bob Howells [00:02:03] We also had one called, "Tampico pearly mussel", that produces a lot of pearls - one of the ones that drew attention of the early Spanish explorers. Originally, I had to kind of guesstimate what its minimum size at maturity was. Turned out, I guessed right, luckily.

Bob Howells [00:02:20] There's another one called "bleufer" that looks identical, and a lot of the pearl harvesters couldn't tell them apart. So, it needed to have the same minimum size limit so they could grow up and reproduce.

Bob Howells [00:02:32] But, when I was doing this, we could see that we had a lot of rare mussels. And again, nobody wanted to talk about listing anything legally as threatened or endangered. So, what I did to offer them two things, two ways of a limited amount of protection...

Bob Howells [00:02:50] One of them was to put a minimum harvest size for all other mussel species. This was a harvest for commercial shells; here's the size for pearl-producing species; and all others have to be at least two and a half inches in shell height to harvest.

Bob Howells [00:03:08] And musselers would judge this by getting a ring of metal or PVC, and if the mussel went through the ring, it was too small, you let it go.

Bob Howells [00:03:18] So, we set a minimum size for all the other mussels in Texas that says you had to be at least two and a half inches in shell height.

Bob Howells [00:03:26] It turns out that a large number of our rarest species never get that big. Therefore, you could never legally harvest them.

Bob Howells [00:03:34] Additionally, ... unlike marine bivalves, if you harvest an oyster, you take the meat, you throw the shell away. If you harvest a freshwater mussel, you throw the meat away and you keep the shell.

Bob Howells [00:03:47] So, the regulations had to apply both to dead shells as well as live mussel specimens. So, shells as well.

Bob Howells [00:03:57] The last thing I could do to offer the rare guys some protection, and this was with support of the commercial musselers, was to establish areas on rivers, and some reservoirs, around the state, "no-mussel-harvest" sanctuaries. From this bridge downstream to that bridge, no one can harvest mussels at all.

Bob Howells [00:04:17] The logic was if you leave them alone to grow and reproduce, they'll infect fish, and the little mussels will spread throughout the system. You don't need a hatchery to do it. They'll take care of themselves, if you can protect a population. The musselers actually supported that.

Bob Howells [00:04:35] Well, some of these no-harvest sanctuaries supported some of our very rarest species too. And that process has continued over the years as well...

Bob Howells [00:04:46] About a year after the regulations had been passed, someone called from a natural history museum and said, "Do you realize most of these rare guys never get big enough to harvest?"

Bob Howells [00:04:56] And I pretended to be quite surprised.