Missouri Conservationist online

Click to Enlarge This cavesnail, Antrobia culveri, can only be found in Tumbling Creek Cave. Drs. Stephanie Clark and David C. Ashley place terra cotta tiles in Tumbling Creek for cavesnails to lay eggs upon. Tom Aley (bottom photo) talks with schoolchildren from Mark Twain Elementary School about water quality.

“This is a story I never get tired of telling.”

This is a story of helping. It’s about how a school helped a snail, and how agencies, local government and individuals came together to help the school help the snail, and how none of this help could have occurred if the snail wasn’t there to help the school in the first place.

The story began in 2004, when Mark Twain Elementary School in Protem discovered that, despite repairs, their aging water treatment lagoon continued to leak raw sewage into the ground.

A new sewage control system would cost Mark Twain Elementary $90,000, a big bite out of the money the 76-student school would normally spend for books, busses and teachers’ salaries.

Compounding the problem was that polluted water from the lagoon was filtering into the recharge area of the Tumbling Creek Cave, a designated national landmark for its biological diversity. Tumbling Creek Cave has more species than any other cave west of the Mississippi River.

Among these species is the story’s hero: the Tumbling Creek cavesnail.

In all the world this species lives only in this one cave, and its numbers have dropped so much in the past 30 years that the species is federally and state endangered. Threats to the cavesnail made the school’s water pollution problem an immediate conservation concern.

Richard Needham, the school’s superintendent, said the situation went from “unnerving” to a happy circumstance, in which three tiers of government—local, state and federal—along with private individuals were working together.

“It was a classic case of cooperation,” he said. “All had an interest in the environment. We wanted to save this cavesnail and keep the school operating.”

Funding was the biggest problem. Because of the threat to the cavesnail, the Conservation Department was able to secure a $20,000 federal Wildlife Diversity Fund grant for the water treatment project.

“That gave the fund-raising effort respectability,” said Tom Aley, owner of the Ozark Underground Laboratory, a research and educational facility in Taney County, which includes Tumbling Creek Cave. “It’s like a jar of pickles. The hardest one to get out is the first one.”

In all, eight different funding sources, including Aley and the Taney County Commission, helped pay for the new water treatment system, which was completed in March. In addition, the U.S. Forest Service deeded to the school the 14 acres on which the old lagoon was located.

“It couldn’t have been better,” Needham said. “For essentially no cost to the school, we ended up with a first-class water treatment system that will last 50 years.”

He said the old lagoon has already been filled, and the area will become a nature reserve and include a butterfly sanctuary. Future plans include a nature trail and an outdoor pavilion that students from Mark Twain Elementary and other schools can use to learn about nature and water quality issues.

“Toward the end, I felt like I was being looked over by a herd of guardian angels,” Needham said, “and it just continues.” He said he is in constant contact with Conservation Department employees Larry Martien and Jay Barber about ways to improve the area by planting native grasses and creating conservation education opportunities.

The Conservation Department has a keen interest in the project because the area is within the Tumbling Creek Cave Ecosystem, one of 33 areas in Missouri that the Conservation Department and conservation partners have identified as Conservation Opportunity Areas. These places provide excellent opportunities to conserve a broad array of plants and animals through focused management and conservation of existing natural systems.

“The Department of Conservation was there at the beginning, and they’re still there,” Needham said. “This is a story I never get tired of telling.”

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