Wisconsin is coming back from its worst drought in decades. Along with unusually high

temperatures, it's affected wildlife in and along the state's rivers.

While spring rains under the drought, recovery in some places has been slow.

PBS Wisconsin's Nathan Denzine tells us about one species that's been hit particularly hard.

We reached peak drought severity in September of last year.

It's been a very dry few years for Wisconsin.

I started getting lots of phone calls from people saying the

there's all these muscles out there and they're you know they're stranded they're

they're dying what can we do it's had a significant impact on a species we hardly

think about I was no longer picking up a muscle and placing it

gently in the water I was throwing them as fast as I could. Much of southern Wisconsin was in a perpetual drought starting in the winter of 2021 through the spring of 2024.

Droughts are very stressful to aquatic organisms as well.

Ellen Voss is the climate resilience director with the Wisconsin River Alliance.

There's just less space for the things that animals and plants and insects and everything else need to survive.

One animal that can be squeezed out by low water is mussels.

They're basically just, you know, a mollusk with two shells and they live in the rivers and Lakes

rivers and streams of Wisconsin.

Lisey Kitchle is a muscle expert at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

They don't have a brain and they don't have eyes.

So they can't just figure out where the deeper water is.

She says there are tens of thousands of muscles on the bed of the Wisconsin River, including 40 different species.

They filter as much as 10 gallons of water a day per muscle, and when there are hundreds and thousands of them,

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