Posted on 09/24/2023 6:17:57 AM PDT by cotton1706
They’re hungry, hungry mollusks.
Thousands of historic shipwrecks sunk in the American Great Lakes are at risk of being lost forever thanks to invasive, wood-destroying mussels.
The lakes are home to an estimated 6,000 shipwrecks, with some dating back to the 17th century, according to estimates from the University of Buffalo.
The Quagga mussel, originally native to the waters of Russia and Ukraine, is believed to have arrived in the Great Lakes in 1989 — possibly as a result of ballast dumps from transoceanic freighters traversing the lakes.
The population of Quagga mussels has exploded in the waters of the once pristine lakes, where near-perfect visibility made the wrecks easy to see even decades after they went down.
Now the Quagga mussels have taken over, scientists say.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
SOS
Save Our Shipwrecks!
Even Kramer didn’t see this one coming.
They were fleeing communism and corruption and are now just trying to make new homes here in the USA by eating abandoned sunken ships. Leave illegal alien mussels alone!
Google says you can eat them if they’re cooked thoroughly, but they’re not really worth the effort.
I had the exact same reaction. And by the way it talks about “pristine clear waters”. Just a few years ago “they” were going apocalyptic over the zebra mussell as an invasive species until they discovered that it actually made the water clearer. Same thing with this...it’s actually CLEANING the garbage out of the water faster.
Decomposition. It happens to you, too.
if it’s a wreck, so what?
whatever was wanted should have been gotten soon after the wreck.
whatever wasn’t gotten was forfeited to nature.
There’s a lot of things going on these days, but ship- eating mussels it not high on the radar.
What they do to water intakes and outlets is really problematic. Ship engines, water plants, dams and everything in the water gets encrusted and then blocked by these damn invasive creatures.
Those canals weren’t such a good idea after all.
Lol!
Quagga mussels are an EU thing
We call them Zebra Mussels here.
Think of the sunken ships as sacrificial — to save still floating (and useful) ones from attack. Ships routinely have sacrificial metal strips to protect against hull corrosion.
How about research into dumping poisons around such wrecks to see if the critters are repelled?
Thanks Larry Lucido. Is anyone here a marine biologist?
Finally somebody points out that shipwrecks are the very least of the problems handed to Great Lakes dwellers by this foreign mussel species.
Don't mention the St. Lawrence Seaway to old time fishermen who saw the lake trout population destroyed by the sea lamprey eels dumped in the lakes by freighters.
Those Zebra Mussels have been giving the Ludington Pumped Storage Plant fits for years.
Well she excels in going down so why not
Buzzards got to eat too.
Detroit, Between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, was destroyed by ever higher taxes, grifting and debt from democrat rule.
Mussels are the least of Michigan’s problems!
This is why the peace bridge hasn’t been rebuilt. Sad stories about how the birds can’t fly around a new structure. Don’t do anything if the old one is historic.
This is why the peace bridge hasn’t been rebuilt. Sad stories about how the birds can’t fly around a new structure. Don’t do anything if the old one is historic.
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