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Tiny, clingy and destructive, Quagga mussel makes its way west

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 17, 2008 at 6:56 am

From the New York Times:

Kneeling at the edge of the dock, Wen Baldwin began hauling on a length of nylon rope that disappeared into the depths of Lake Mead. One after another, an odd assemblage of objects — a water bottle, a chunk of concrete, a pair of flip-flops, a steel anchor — emerged from the emerald-green waters. A living blanket of tiny, striped mussels covered each one. “The conditions here are ideal for these things, absolutely ideal,” said Mr. Baldwin, 70, a retired design engineer and a National Park Service volunteer.

The mussel-coated debris is unmistakable evidence of an event occurring silently and largely out of sight — the colonization of the Colorado River by the quagga mussel, a fingernail-size Eurasian bivalve with an astonishing sex drive and a nasty reputation for causing economic and ecological havoc. Like the closely related zebra mussel, the quagga can cling tenaciously to hard surfaces, like the equipment of the many hydroelectric and water-supply plants along the lower Colorado. “They’re going to be all over the pipes, all over the intakes,” said Gary L. Fahnenstiel, senior ecologist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s going to be devastating.”

Dr. Fahnenstiel ought to know. The quagga has carpeted much of the Great Lakes, largely displacing the better-known zebra. Its invasion of the Colorado, presumably after crossing the Rockies on recreational boats hitched to trailers, foretells major disruptions not just for utilities, but also for the entire ecology of the lower river.

By stripping nutrients and microorganisms from the water, the mussel could do grave damage to a wide variety of species, including small invertebrates, fish and birds. “This is one bad hombre,” Dr. Fahnenstiel said. “It’s almost your worst-case scenario for affecting the entire food chain.”

Read the full text of this story from the New York Times by clicking here.

June 17, 2008 · Filed Under Invasive Species

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