It is well known and documented that marine suspension-feeders possess a significant capacity for clearing the water column of particles.
Combining a huge individual water clearance capacity with dense populations, benthic suspension-feeders have the potential for controlling phytoplankton concentrations and water turbidity in well-defined coastal basins. Realization of this potential have also been have shown in the Baltic area and substantial increase in environmental quality of an estuary due to clearance of benthic suspension-feeders have been demonstrated. It is thus obvious to suggest active use of bivalve cultures to mitigate effects of excess run-off of nutrients from land, especially as harvest of the farmed mussels will imply a return of nutrients bound in mussel tissue back to land thus reversing eutrophication.
In fact, the basic concept of mitigating the effects of eutrophication using mussel farming is to consider excess amounts of nutrients in the coastal waters as a resource to be recycled back to land. In one of the few full-scale trials of the basic mussel mitigation concept, growing mussels in an approx. 19 ha mussel farm in the Limfjorden, the concept was in fact proven efficient and compatible with land based measures in terms of cost and area efficiency.
