Isaac Lea: the man behind the mussels

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In 1852, when Isaac Lea became the first person to write down observations about the Carolina heelsplitter, the Monroe Connector-Bypass hadn’t even been dreamed up.

These days, hardly anyone talks about Lea. But lots of people are speculating about what’s going to happen with the roughly $800 million proposed toll road project.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can’t seem to make up its mind about whether it wants to support it, and pending litigation from environmentalists throws even more uncertainty into the picture.

At the center of the debate is the Carolina heelsplitter, or Lasmigona decorata, a species of medium-sized freshwater mussel the federal government labeled endangered June 30, 1993.

The road project, designed to alleviate congestion along U.S. 74, has the potential to harm the habitat of the heelsplitter. When the North Carolina Turnpike Authority released an environmental impact study on the project, environmentalists called it a shell game. They said the authority’s analysis of the impacts under a scenario that involved not building the bypass actually used data that projected that the bypass had already been built.

Those concerns made the USFWS people yank back their support of the project.

In the meantime, many potential real estate deals are said to be in limbo as the project remains on pause. Developers would like to know for sure that the 20-mile road is going to be built before they’ll they start investing money in projects.

But back to Lea.

He had no idea that 159 years later there would be tussles over his mussels.

Born in 1792 in Wilmington, Del., Lea — not to be confused with the dead British soccer player Isaac G. Lea — was a businessman and scientist specializing in geology and conchology, which is the study of mollusks and shells.

Lea, who is said to be of Quaker descent, had planned to become a physician, but when he turned 15 he began working in the Philadelphia mercantile business of his brother and eventually became a partner.

While in Philadelphia, Lea and pal Lardner Vanuxem wandered through the countryside collecting rocks, fossils and minerals. Lea took a liking to mollusks, a phylum of invertebrates that includes a large group of animals that give a lot of people the willies: snails, octopi, clams.

Lea would eventually amass a huge collection of freshwater mussels from the family Unionidae, which either makes him a hoarder or important contributor to science, depending on how you look at such things.

In 1821, still 31 years before he would describe the Carolina heelsplitter, the world was Lea’s oyster, and he married well: Frances Anne Carey, daughter of Mathew Carey, a Philadelphia publisher of Irish descent.

Probably because Isaac couldn’t put food on the table for his daughter by collecting clamshells all day, Mathew gave his new son-in-law a job in his publishing house, Mathew Carey and Sons.

Lea would go on to have a son, Henry Charles Lea, who became a historian, civic reformer and political activist in Philadelphia. H.C., like his old man, took an interest in science, but after he suffered a nervous breakdown he started focusing more on history. In the late 1800s, H.C. seemed to like trying to block various construction projects.

I could go on and on, as more seems to have been written about son than father.

It’s hard to find any anecdotes about how Lea stumbled upon the Carolina heelsplitter. Did he, for example, split his heel on one? What is known is he described it as Unio decoratus. He also was the first to describe the Tennessee heelsplitter.

Lea, lover of mollusks that he was, would probably be sad to know that the Carolina heelsplitter isn’t doing so hot. The USFWS says poor water quality resulting from silt runoff and pollution caused by poor land use practices is to blame.

As for Lea’s own extinction, little is known. Perhaps he ate a raw mollusk and became fatally ill; in his day, after all, restaurants did not warn that the consumption of raw or undercooked shellfish might increase the risk of food-borne illness.

For now, his heelsplitter is alive, if not well, but still powerful enough to put the brakes on a construction project.

H.C. would be proud.

Roberts can be reached at [email protected].