What kind of "feedback" do you get from the mussels in a polluted environment? Is it death or something more interesting?
I know we’re being tongue in cheek, but I do wonder if there is anyway to actually use them as online sensors without causing too much undue harm?
I’m pretty sure we’ve seen shrimp farming applications but no mollusks yet.
You can do image analysis to count the shellfish in the image, and attach an “open” or “closed” status to each. Once you have a reliable field of Boolean values, you can detect anomalies in the close count.
You could then have a grid of tanks with inlets from the clean water supply and outlets to the sewer where you monitored (more or less real time) the reaction to our clean water supply.