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 ...
“WIKI says they can get up to two inches in size! That’s eaten size!....”
“can” is the important word there. In ideal conditions, maybe. But, in general, only about .ooo1% of them do. They’re all small up here in Lake Erie. Very small.
“Zebra mussels are particularly insidious in that they undermine the very foundation of the Great Lakes’ food web. Being filer feeders, zebra mussels rob fish and other organisms of the food they need. They offer nothing in return; they provide no value as a prey organism and throw the natural ecosystem out of balance. Zebra mussels are implicated in the alarming disappearance of Diporeia, a key native zooplankter that is vital to the diet of many native fish species. Zebra mussels, when they interact with round gobies, another exotic pest, help produce the conditions that move botulism up the food web, killing Great Lakes fish and birds.
“Overall, zebra mussels have cost the fishery, the economy, and the people of the region dearly. It is time to learn from the hard lessons zebra mussels have taught us,” says Gaden. “We must manage the ballast from oceangoing vessels; ballast that has permanently littered our lakes with trash species like zebra mussels.”
http://www.glu.org/english/invasive_species/zebramussel/index.htm
“Besides clogging pipes and devouring most of the available microscopic food supply, zebra mussels may present a health hazard by increasing human and wildlife exposure to organic pollutants such as PCBs and PAHs. Studies have shown that zebra mussels can accumulate the pollutants in their tissues in concentrations 300,000 times greater than in the environment. They deposit these pollutants as pseudofeces, loose pellets of mucous mixed with particulate matter that they filter from the water. Scavenging animals that eat the pseudofeces may pass these pollutants up the food chain.”
http://www.gma.org/surfing/human/zebra.html
They kill off other life in lakes by eating their food supply. Looks like the only way to remove the mussels would be if they themselves ran out of food. But by that time, all other life in lakes would have already been killed off.
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