The current crisis isn't the first time North America's rich array of freshwater mussels have been taken to the brink of extinction. For about two decades around the turn of the 20th century, freshwater mussels were hauled out of the water by the tonne to make buttons with a fashionable pearly shimmer. Not even the species with shells too thin to make buttons from were spared, says G. Thomas Watters, who studies molluscs at Ohio State University: 'The idea was if you threw them back, you were just going to waste time recollecting them. Better to just kill them all."
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机译：当前的危机并不是北美首屈一指的淡水贻贝濒临灭绝的边缘。在20世纪之交的大约二十年中，吨贻贝将淡水贻贝拖出水面，制成带有时尚珍珠光泽的纽扣。俄亥俄州州立大学研究软体动物的G.托马斯·沃特斯（G. Thomas Watters）说，甚至没有那些壳太薄而无法制成纽扣的物种也幸免于难：“想法是，如果将它们扔回去，那只会浪费时间来收集它们。最好杀死他们全部。”
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