Currently, we usually measure the threshold at which mussels are released by hydrodynamic forces in the laboratory, for example, with stream channels. But we do not yet have a practical tool that mussel farmers can use on site to measure mussel bed stability. Our goal was to develop such a tool.
The ideal design would be a small framework that mussel farmers could use from their vessels. This framework has a mechanism to move mussels sideways so that we can measure the forces they can withstand. While this sounds promising, we were not sure if we could obtain useful data from it. Therefore, we first created a prototype and conducted tests with small mussel beds.
To read more about this see:Knowledge base: Development of the RAMS (= Rapid Assessment Mussel Stability) tool