This US state has become an unexpected epicenter of the global extinction crisis

A biologist at the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center picks up a handful of endangered pale lilliput mussels. | Benji Jones/Vox

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, On a sweltering afternoon in June, 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, the ditch was filled with cool, flowing water, a bit of trash, and, apparently, some highly endangered fish.

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.

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.

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.

“We got all three!” said Drummond, who had a beard and tattoos on his arms.

The fish were darters, slender, 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 US.

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

It’s an unexpected epicenter of endangered species, too, those that are at risk of extinction and listed under the Endangered Species Act. According to a Vox 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, however, is that Alabama doesn’t have enough money to help these animals that are most at risk.

Alabama is an extreme example of a challenge facing many US 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.

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’s rivers and recreation industry, they also tend to be small, out of sight, and generally short on charisma, unlike, say, wolves, panthers, or whales. That makes projects to help them an even harder sell for limited environmental dollars.

That’s to say nothing of the state’s politics. Alabama is one of the country’s most conservative states, and Republicans have earned a reputation for opposing environmental protections. In 2022, the state’s Republican US congressional representatives all voted against a nonpartisan bill that would have likely quintupled funding for Alabama’s non-game species, like the endangered darters I saw in the roadside stream, had it not stalled out before passing the Senate. Some of the state’s congressional Republicans have also thrown support behind projects that may endanger even more species.

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’s 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.

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A good rule 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.

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.

Mussels are essentially nature’s 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.

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.

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.

Mussels have a “foot” that helps them burrow, but they can’t 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.

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.

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.

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’s mouth and over its gills.

My favorite examples come from mussels in the genus Epioblasma, 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, and 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.

Different kinds of mussels typically rely on different “host” 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.

To rear these mussels in captivity, scientists first find and collect pregnant, or “gravid,” 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 “infected” 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’re collected by scientists. From there, the young mussels grow in plastic buckets indoors and, once they’re a bit bigger, in plastic buckets outdoors, in a nearby well-fed pond.

I visited the pond one sunny afternoon with Johnson, 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’s been working with endangered species for more than 30 years.

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, thanks to some confusing physics, help cycle water through them, mimicking a stream. It looked and sounded like the water around the dock was boiling.

Johnson pulled one of the buckets onto the dock. Inside was what looked like hundreds of pumpkin seeds, golden and glossy as if they’d been dipped in caramel. These were baby pale lilliputs, a federally endangered mussel species, so named for its small size; they’re about an inch and a half long when fully grown.

Lilliputs are native to rivers of Alabama and Tennessee, but they nearly went extinct in the mid-1900s, as the US government turned rivers into channels, farmland spread, and cities and suburbs expanded. “There are more of these in this bucket than there are in museum collections around the world,” Johnson said, to emphasize how rare they are.

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. “That is absolutely one of the rarest species in the United States,” 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.

You might imagine that a facility managing hundreds of some of the nation’s 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, Tupperware containers in refrigerators, plastic buckets with holes cut into them. AABC has only four full-time employees. The buildings are old and falling apart. “It’s low budget,” Buntin said with a snicker.

“We have the most species and the fewest dollars.”

Paul Johnson

That’s partly out of choice, Johnson said. Simple, homemade systems are easier to fix if they break. But it’s also because the facility, like so many state conservation efforts across the country, is wildly underfunded for the number of species it is charged with bringing back from the brink of extinction.

“We have the most species and the fewest dollars,” Johnson said of Alabama, adding, sarcastically: “That makes a lot of sense.”

The headwinds facing efforts like this begin far upstream. Most funding for state wildlife agencies, which oversee the bulk of the country’s conservation, including endangered and threatened species, actually comes from selling hunting and fishing licenses, along with federal excise taxes on guns, ammo, and fishing gear.

This setup not only encourages states to promote gun use but 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’s endangered species, including most of those in Alabama.

Just look at the roughly $450 million annual budget for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which manages parks, hunting, and conservation. Of that, only about 1 percent goes toward helping non-game 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’s non-game division and receives a total annual budget of just $750,000, Silvano said.

While funding for non-game species is a challenge nationwide, Alabama is, in some ways, also uniquely ill-positioned.

Alabama 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 is made available for at-risk animal species is allocated based on a state’s geographic size and human population, not 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.

“The states with the greatest biodiversity challenges aren’t necessarily the states receiving funding proportional to those challenges,” said Michelle Lute, executive director of the advocacy group Wildlife for All.

These problems are not unfixable. A few years ago, the US House voted on Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would have dispersed $1.3 billion across all US states to protect their imperiled species, including some $25 million for 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’t agree on how to pay for it.

The value of Alabama’s overlooked species

Mussels aren’t the only aquatic species that benefit the state’s waterways.

Snails are janitors of the river, eating algae and dead plants. They also provide food for a range of other species including fish, turtles, and birds. By burrowing, crayfish help aerate the soil, making space for plant roots, and create new homes for other species. Darters are sensitive to changes in water quality, so they serve as indicators of ecosystem health; they also provide food for fish like bass that people like to catch.

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

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.

Preserving the state’s unique ecological heritage has also been a selling point for conservation, he said, many of these aquatic species are found only in Alabama, and that makes people want to help save them.

If there’s 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.

On another muggy 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, a pole connected to a ring-shaped base, which she kept submerged underwater.

Atkinson wasn’t searching for metallic treasures but biological ones. She was looking for very rare mussels.

A mussel evangelist who often works with AABC, Atkinson was searching with Johnson for Coosa moccasinshells that had been released here in recent years. Scientists “chipped” several of them before releasing them in the river, which means the mussels were fitted with a microchip, not unlike a pet dog or cat. The device that Atkinson was carrying, known as a PIT-tag reader, helps locate those chips, making it easier for researchers to monitor rare mussel populations.

Despite its resource constraints, AABC has released roughly 300,000 mussels across more than a dozen species in Alabama’s 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, the pale lilliput, the ones that look like golden pumpkin seeds, that it may soon be eligible for delisting under the Endangered Species Act, meaning it would no longer be considered endangered.

Two other species are on their way to getting off the list, too, Johnson said, largely owing to AABC’s 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. “We can expand what we’re doing pretty easily,” Johnson said.

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

I thought she’d 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.

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.

“It’s gratifying to see that they’re still persisting and that we chose the right habitat,” said Johnson, who had been busy collecting pea-size snails to show me.

I’ll 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.

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.

The abundant wildlife in Alabama might not be charismatic in a traditional sense, but there’s 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, there are about 100 species in Alabama, many of which are imperiled, appear to engineer ventilation systems that bring fresh air into their underground burrows.

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 “primary burrowers,” Brian Helms, a researcher who studies these animals at Alabama’s 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.

It’s 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’t see that, the animals within them may not be around for much longer.

Melissa Hirsch contributed reporting.