Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the Invasive Species Category
Click here to view all posts

Searching for solution to mussel invasions

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 6, 2008 at 6:34 am

From the Nevada Appeal:

When zebra mussels were found in January in San Justo Reservoir, about 250 miles away from Lake Tahoe in California, state and local agencies made the decision to close the lake to boating. “Boating on there is not really heavy,” said Alexia Retallack, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Game who has been working closely with the reservoir. “For their purposes, they were more concerned with the spread.”

San Justo is one example of how a water body infected with invasive mussels has handled the creatures. Quagga and zebra mussels are cousins in the same species family that have similarly devastating effects. Originally from Europe, they have no natural controls in America and can multiply rapidly, destroying the economy and ecology of a body of water, from boating to fishing to beaches. They never have been successfully eradicated from a body of water.

Closing the San Justo was a viable solution because of the reservoir’s size and number of access points, Retallack said. But the control method for a body of water, once infected, is dependent on many variables, including size, recreation uses and point in the water system. “It depends, because each water body is in a unique position, there are so many variables,” she said.

Once established, there is no way to eradicate them. Well, one way: a body of water in an abaondoned rock quarry in Virginia was infected with Zebra mussels in August of 2002, and 174,000 gallons of potassium chloride was injected into the water over a period of three weeks. But such techniques aren’t really an option for a lake the size of Lake Tahoe - or most other bodies of water.

But other solutions might be on the horizon:

Zebra and quagga mussels are controlled in their native Europe because of the natural predators in that environment that don’t exist in North America.

However, some researchers are looking at biological solutions to quagga mussels, and one has discovered a small part of the solution. Dan Molloy, director of the Cambridge Field Laboratory of the New York State Museum, and a team of scientists have been researching a biological control for two decades. Recently, they discovered a soil bacteria that kills zebra and quagga mussels while not harming other organisms in the ecology.

The product was developed for power plants in lieu of chemicals, but research could be done on how it would fare in reservoirs, Molloy said. “The U.S. Bureau of Land Reclamation is interested in the potential for this,” Molloy said. “Now, people are interested if it could be used in the West in open water.”

Read the full text of this story from the Nevada Appeal by clicking here.

June 6, 2008 · Filed Under Invasive Species

Comments

Leave a Reply