CHEROKEE COUNTY, Kansas – For decades before anyone talked about cleaning up the pollution in one of the world’s top lead and zinc mining regions, heavy metals pummeled the Spring River.
The wildlife took a beating in this waterway that flows from the Missouri Ozarks into Kansas and down toward Oklahoma’s Grand Lake, a popular fishing and boating spot.
In stretches of the river, and its feeder streams that crossed paths with intense mining, many of the animals couldn’t survive the onslaught of toxicity.
“The fish community was greatly reduced,” said James Whitney, an associate professor of biology at Pittsburg State University. “There was basically no mussels at all.”
Losses like that can batter an entire food web.
Mussel beds, for example, feed river otters, raccoons, muskrats, map turtles and other predators. They create underwater habitats – kind of like coral reefs, Whitney notes – where algae grow, insect larvae graze and hunt, and small fish and snails find refuge. Each mussel also filters gallons of water daily, processing bacteria and nutrients.
In the 1980s, major environmental cleanups began. Water quality has improved in the most polluted portions of the Spring River.
Now Scientists from Pittsburg State University are finding evidence that some animals are bouncing back. They see encouraging signs for fish, mussels and insects.
Their discovery highlights the impact of mining pollution cleanups that were kickstarted by a series of landmark federal environmental laws.
It also fits with findings in other states, such as Colorado, Montana and Idaho, where some aquatic species are showing similar signs of recovery from mining pollution since the advent of Superfund cleanups.
Hear the story of the Spring River on the latest episode of Up From Dust, the Kansas News Service’s environment podcast.
Ecologists spend much of their time facing down the somber reality that many habitats and species across the globe are struggling. In this river, they’ve found some news worth celebrating.
Animals, including some endangered and threatened species, are benefiting from the drop in heavy metals.
To Kai Baucom, a graduate student and part of a Pittsburg State crew that searched the Spring River for mussels last summer, it’s a welcome experience as she prepares for a career in this field.
“Yes, you’re going to report species declines,” she said. “But every once in a while you do hit those hopeful (examples) – where you find that they’re increasing. So I feel like I’m entering a hopeful field rather than a depressing field.”
The legacy of mining in the Spring River basin
Mining for coal and metals in this corner of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma began in the mid-1800s.
The region, now called the Tri-State Mining District, became one of the world’s top sources of lead and zinc. The activity fizzled out by the 1970s, leaving behind millions of cubic yards of mining waste.
When rain hits the waste piles and abandoned mine shafts, it washes toxic substances into waterways. This pollution poses a danger to both humans and wildlife.
Acid mine drainage, cadmium, copper, lead and zinc hit the Spring River hardest downstream from where Center Creek meets it on the Missouri-Kansas border.
The river remained cleaner upstream where it and its tributaries flowed through land that wasn’t as intensively mined. This detail is important because some species that died off or greatly dwindled in the pollution downstream — such as the endangered Neosho mucket — were able to keep stronger populations in the cleaner upstream.
“This has just kind of been a sanctuary,” Whitney said, “for Neosho muckets and other mussels.”
Later, when water quality started improving downstream, those animals could spread out and grow their numbers again.
Why did water quality improve? Not only did the region’s mining industry wind down, federal regulation of pollution ramped up.
This happened because of Americans’ growing frustration with dangerously dirty rivers and lakes, the near extinction of the bald eagle from DDT pesticide and other problems.
Public concern mounted that the country was under-regulating factories, strip mines and other sources of pollution.
This spurred a raft of key federal laws meant to shield communities, habitats and drinking water supplies, and to protect species that were trending toward extinction.
These laws included the 1972 Clean Water Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act and the 1980 Superfund law for major environmental cleanups.
The areas targeted for work included the Tri-State Mining District.
“That all really gets into gear in the eighties and nineties,” Whitney said, “trying to clean up these areas, do habitat remediation … cover up some of these chat piles (mining waste) or bury them, plug up mine shafts.”
The new mining law didn’t just regulate ongoing coal mining, it levied a fee on the coal to help deal with abandoned mines. Meanwhile, parts of the Tri-State Mining District were added to the nation’s list of Superfund sites in the 1980s.
Those daunting cleanups are ongoing, but thousands of acres have been remediated.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and parties potentially liable for the contamination have remediated 14 miles of streams, 25 million cubic yards of mining waste and more than 3,000 properties in Jasper County, Missouri, EPA Region 7 staff said in an update last year.
The history of mining and smelting in that area, known as the Oronogo-Duenweg Mining Belt Superfund Site, is a key source of the heavy metals that reach the Spring River through tributaries such as Center Creek.
Today, the Spring River still has a heavy metal problem but the levels have dropped enough for Pittsburg State University scientists to start documenting some intriguing changes.
Pitt State scientists find signs of recovery
Since 2019, Pitt State students and faculty have been studying how the drop in pollution is affecting wildlife in the historically polluted parts of the Spring River.
The river is home to several imperiled fish and mussel species, such as rabbitsfoot and western fanshell mussels.
The Pitt State researchers found promising numbers of Neosho madtom — a finger-sized catfish on the federal threatened species list. They counted numbers similar to the population that lives upstream in historically cleaner parts of the river.
This is significant because just decades earlier, those little catfish had been struggling in the mining-polluted areas. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found just 1% as many Neosho madtoms as one would expect.
Pitt State researchers checked to see if other riffle fish were rebounding, too. Riffle fish are species that occupy shallow, fast-moving waters. Pollution tends to hit them hard.
Several other species were recovering, possibly for a few reasons. Not only had the river become a more liveable place for them, but also for the things they eat, such as insect larvae.
Next the researchers started studying mussels.
A scientist searching where the river flows through Baxter Springs, Kansas, couldn’t find any mussels in 1985. Over the past three years, Pitt State scientists have found six species living at that spot.
In 2024, they found the first live Neosho mucket and Ouachita kidneyshell mussels downstream from where Shoal Creek historically dumped a lot of lead into the river. The federal government lists the mucket as endangered and Kansas lists the kidneyshell as threatened.
Recent Pitt State graduate Jamie Leeper says the diversity of mussel species matters to the health of river systems, even if people don’t often think about these shellfish.
“They’ve all got their niche and they’ve got their role in the ecosystem,” said Leeper, who helped search for mussels on the Spring River last summer. “Whether or not they’re there affects other organisms that you might actually care about.”
New troubles are brewing upstream
But even as these positive developments for the Spring River unfold, the story is developing a new wrinkle.
In some historically cleaner parts of the river — upstream from the legacy of mining pollution — mussels are starting to struggle.
The first clue came from Ed Miller, a mussel expert then working for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.
Miller had been keeping tabs on a mussel bed in this cleaner part of the river.
Then about five years ago, the mussel bed started to collapse. Comparing 2014 to 2020, Miller’s mussel counts at the spot dropped by 95%.
Was this an isolated problem or were other mussel beds hurting, too?
In 2023, Pittsburg State scientists set out to answer the question.
Students and faculty searched for mussels at certain spots in the river. They also dug into the data collected by other scientists going back to the 1980s.
Mussel densities in this historically much healthier stretch of the river dropped dramatically — somewhere in the range of 67% to 96% at the spots they studied.
These data are a sobering counterpoint to the population gains happening downstream.
Joshua Holloway, another member of the Pitt State research team, said he tries to keep the mindset that documenting environmental challenges is one step toward tackling them.
“The only way things are going to get better is to put forth the work,” he said, “to maybe just maybe provide a potential shot that these species can make a recovery.”
Holloway’s graduate research and thesis focused on mussels in the Spring River.
Pitt State researchers don’t yet know why mussels are declining upstream. However, they found that the water in this stretch of river is experiencing spikes of ammonia — especially when the river swells after rainstorms.
The ammonia appears to be entering the river from certain tributaries, particularly the North Fork. It could be killing off baby mussels, leaving the adults to age without younger generations to replace them.
Agricultural changes in the watershed could play a role. The Pitt State team found that the number of poultry farms in Jasper County, Missouri, has more than doubled since the early 2000s. Without adequate steps to keep feces and litter from running off a poultry farm, ammonia can run off into nearby rivers.
Confirming whether this can fully explain the cause of the mussel declines would take further research. But one conclusion is clear to Whitney.
“It just shows how complicated conservation and ecology can be in a river system and how quickly things can change,” he said. “ There’s always new threats coming about.”
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
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