Establishing mussel behaviour as a monitoring tool to measure climatic disturbances

Freshwater mussels (FM) are suitable biological indicators to assess environmental stressors. Behaviour is a good parameter to measure rapid mussel’s responses. In this sense, valvometric method, that exploits the Hall sensor (real-time remote monitoring tool), has been used to measure the behavioural responses of mussels (valve opening amplitude and valve opening-closure frequency). During the last two decades, these methodologies have been used to measure the presence of the pollutants in the waterbodies. However, studies that focus on physical disturbances in the environment related to climate changes are lacking. Since future climatic scenarios in Europe predict an increase in temperatu…