Preparing For Invasive Mussels

Preparing For Invasive Mussels

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

No, Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t taking over Washington state, wrong kind of mussels. These invasive mussels are the aquatic kind known as zebra mussels, a small, tenacious, freshwater mollusk with a striped shell that quickly encrusts underwater surfaces. Zebra mussels and the closely related quagga mussels have caused more than $1 billion in damage in the Great Lakes region. Steve Bollens, Director of the WSU School of the Environment explains where these mussels originated from and how they could find their way to Washington state.

BOLLENS: These two species of mussels are indigenous to Eurasia. They came over the North Atlantic almost certainly in the ballast water of ships and arrived in North America in the 1980’s. They spread very rapidly through the Great Lakes and through much of the Eastern United States.They have entered the state and the Northwest more broadly on small boats that are trailered into the area. More than a hundred such boats have been identified to have zebra mussels attached to them. But fortunately we have not yet found them infested in the waters of the Columbia River.

In an effort to ramp up the research necessary to put preventative measures into place before such an invasion takes place the Bonneville Power Administration has provided a $630 thousand research grant. Tomorrow Bollens will talk about the risks zebra mussels pose to the Columbia River Basin and how he and co-investigators Tim Counihan, research fishery biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Gretchen Rollwagen-Bollens, a professor at WSU Vancouver, plan to proceed in their efforts to ward off a zebra mussels invasion in the Pacific Northwest.

 

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.