Hacker News

The story starts with a German man, John Boepple, in his button shop in Germany. He immigrates to the US with the resolve to search for more freshwater mussels. So yes, it is relevant if you're interested in telling a story of the events that transpired.

I think it's because it's the Smithsonian magazine. Smithsonian celebrates the origins of people and things that shaped some part of American history.

It's significant that "Boepple immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s, resolving to search for more of these freshwater mussels."

And he was German. Lots of Germans emigrated to the USA, especially around that time. so it's important context of who this man was

In college, I worked as a lab assistant for a professor studying them. I spent a lot of time counting microscopic young, scraping adults off of traps, measuring and weighing them before cracking them open to scoop out their insides and weighing them.

These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells.

Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.

An economic incentive to hunt a particular species does not result in a decrease in population. What you have instead is an economic incentive to breed large populations in uncontrolled conditions, likely on public land, which then get abandoned and/or released when you realize the economic incentive has made your invasive species problem far, far worse.

This has happened many times throughout history.

Probably not as economical as cheap plastic buttons, and harvesting them at low cost would likely disrupt native species too

As noted in the article, plastic buttons displaced buttons made from clamshells long ago. I doubt a market for zebra mussel buttons could make any dent on the population.

you can use anything for buttons if you are dedicated enough and have the right tools

> TLDR: Consequently many freshwater mussel species are now extinct

The problem with the DR part of TLDR is that you miss a lot of detail. There are more factors than just the button industry.

> To survive past the larvae stage, they must become parasites that attach themselves to fish. If the fish populations are declining, that oftentimes has an indirect effect on mussel abundance

> the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deepened the rivers and constructed a system of dams, destroying the habitats of mussels that had evolved to live in shallower waters.

> Increasingly polluted waters also took a toll.