NEW ORLEANS— The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed to protect the Alabama hickorynut in the Mobile Basin as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The agency also proposed to protect a newly identified freshwater mussel species in Louisiana and Mississippi as threatened.

“I’m celebrating the fact that Alabama hickorynuts now have a fighting chance at survival with these lifesaving protections,” said Lindsay Reeves, a Louisiana-based attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “But we’re still witnessing a freshwater extinction crisis here in the Southeast. To make sure these mighty mussels have a future, we need to address the dams that block streams and rivers across the region.”

The Center petitioned the agency to protect the rare mussel back in 2010. Alabama hickorynuts and other freshwater mussels are threatened by dams, sedimentation, pollution, climate change and development.

There are an estimated 3,404 dams within the Mobile River basin alone, with impoundments affecting more than 1,000 miles of river habitat.

Dams kill mussels during construction and dredging, suffocate them by accumulating sediments, lower their food and oxygen availability by reducing water flow, and destroy local populations of fish that mussels need to reproduce. Impoundment is a cause of extinction and wipes out local populations of native freshwater mussels in all major river basins within the eastern United States.

Since the 2010 petition was submitted, ongoing genetic research has revealed that the Alabama hickorynut is actually two species divided by which watershed they live in. The proposed listing would also protect as threatened the newly split species that has not yet been formally named.

The two new species live in the Pascagoula, Pearl, Tangipahoa, Tickfaw and Amite rivers in Mississippi and Louisiana. These mussels are similarly threatened by river impoundment, including the One Lake Project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Jackson, Mississippi.

Nearly 70% of U.S. freshwater mussels are at risk of extinction, but only 30% are protected under the Endangered Species Act. The Act, which turned 50 last year, has saved 99% of the plants and animals under its care and 90% of the 1,800 listed species are moving toward recovery.