Posted on 11/20/2008 10:52:25 AM PST by NormsRevenge
SALT LAKE CITY – Trouble-making zebra mussels have arrived in Utah. But not where they were expected to show up.
Electric Lake is Utah's first body of water where the damaging, nonnative mussels have been confirmed, state wildlife officials said Wednesday.
The officials said they were surprised the fast-spreading mussels appeared there first because it's a high-elevation lake with relatively few boaters. It is boaters who sometimes unknowingly transport the mussels from lake to lake on their crafts.
Most expected the mussels to show up first at Lake Powell.
The mussels "showed up in one of the least-expected places," said Larry Dalton, aquatic invasive species coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. "That's how bewildering this little devil is."
Zebra mussels and their cousins, quagga mussels, were inadvertently introduced into the Great Lakes about 20 years ago. They reproduce and spread rapidly, threatening food sources for fish and clogging machinery and water pipes.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
A guy I graduated HS with up in Michigan became a professional diver, their company made a fortune cleaning out the Cook county nuke plant intake pipes over in lake Michigan, and the intake pipes near Detroit were an almost continuous contract for them. A few years out of HS and he had a house, new car and was doing really well, all thanks to those little buggers.
One of the biggest problems with zebra mussels is they clean the water so well that seaweed and grasses explode from the sunlight getting down so deep, a major problem in itself when the shorelines start looking like the Sargasso sea.
They are a big problem in the Great Lakes Region.
These little bastages clogged and messed up the water intake on my sailboat. They spread like wildfire and multiple like free-lovin’ liberal hippy rabbits on steroids. There is no death too wicked for them. Die you little bastages, DIE!
They may be a blessing in disguise. When the Famine Times come, they will be very welcome.....................
One more time, in English.
Yup.
Most can’t even imagine how it would be if they went four or five days without a meal.
By then, they’d be ready to eat shoe leather boiled with a couple onions.
I guarantee if I had about a quart of them things, I could make a very, very tasty soup or stew.
Let’s find something that eats them and turn a bunch of that loose in the lake.
Are these heat seeking mussels?
Beat me with the pic by a minute!
Batter fry them and leave the crunchy “shells” on.
I guar-ron-teee that cajuns will eat any'ting!
Are you drinking?
Nothing is too tiny.
Make a paste...
A local Chinese restaurant serves a clam soup with clams in shells about the same exact size of those mussels.......
“Let’s find something that eats them and turn a bunch of that loose in the lake.”
Hey! Yeah! Let’s ;et the Lampreys back in! Really, we should genetically modify them to grow huge, and solve the World’s food shortages.
LOL!!!............. They are apparently Stealth Cruise Mussels!.............
They eat by filtering the water. They are so effective that if the body of water they are in is at all polluted they become concentrated depositories of the pollutants that they absorb.
Too small to make a harvestable meal for anything but the few smaller species that feed on them, many of which are poisoned.
They entered the Great Lakes from ballast water of overseas vessels.
I don’t really know if they are less of a problem overseas due to natural predators, but here they really impact lakes and waterways and will be a problem for power plants, boats in those waters, sluce gates and locks and existing vegatation. They encrust themselves on anything as shown by the photos above. Got a bilge pump or cooling water intake on your boat, it will get clogged and it is something that requies chisels to remove.
WIKI says they can get up to two inches in size! That's eaten size!................
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