5/15/2023 0 Comments Zebra mussels![]() ![]() Smithsonian Environmental Research Center/CC by 2.0ĭaniel showed the pet store manager how to kill the freshwater interloper by dunking it in super-salty water, and they removed the moss balls from the shelves. “If they’re in Washington and Florida, I’m assuming they’re going to be distributed everywhere in between.” Over the past several decades, zebra mussels have spread throughout the United States and Canada. That made him realize the Seattle sighting wasn’t “a weird fluke,” he says. At the first pet store he surveyed, Daniel found an adult zebra mussel clinging to a moss ball. ![]() By March 2, Daniel had learned about the post, reviewed some photos, rallied colleagues at the state and federal level, and canvassed for the little green blobs in Gainesville, Florida, where he lives. “It’s not a pathway we had ever considered.”Īn employee at the Seattle store uploaded the sighting February 25. ![]() Other non-native species have been known to hitchhike on plants-salamanders from the northwest, for instance, have been ushered eastward on Christmas trees-but “we never expected zebra mussels to travel through aquarium plants,” Daniel says. That’s how Wesley Daniel, the database coordinator and a fisheries biologist at the USGS, recently learned that a zebra mussel had turned up on an imported moss ball in a Seattle Petco. Around 30 years ago, to keep track of sightings of zebra mussels and other introduced species, the USGS set up the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database. Fish and Wildlife Service, one of several agencies that has tried for decades to stop the spread. By 2020, the mussels had been seen in more than 600 lakes and reservoirs around the country, according to the U.S. They’re taking something out of the food web, and not putting anything back in.” “If they’re in Washington and Florida, I’m assuming they’re going to be distributed everywhere in between.”īy 1990, notes United States Geological Survey (USGS) fishery biologist Amy Benson in a report, zebra mussels had been spotted in all five Great Lakes. “They filled this niche and they don’t have any predators. Zebra mussels are “pretty much bad news all around,” says Ceci Weibert, an aquatic invasive species senior program specialist with the Great Lakes Commission. Several hundred thousand can crowd a single square meter, and they’re persistent: They hide in tangles of aquatic plants snagged on motors, can colonize essentially any hard surface, and are able to survive outside the water for several days. In lakes and rivers, zebra mussels filter vast quantities of water and siphon the nutrients for themselves. As adults, they tussle for space, encrusting water pipes and the hulls of boats, and glomming on to their neighbors. Larvae, known as veligers, are visible only under magnification. Sperm and eggs drift freely, and females can lay more than a million in a single season. Once the mussels enter a waterway, they have no trouble moving around it. Ecologists are concerned that people might introduce zebra-mussel-infested moss balls into waterways. The mussels probably sloshed around in ballast water, stored to stabilize an empty ship and released before it’s loaded with cargo. Zebra mussels, named for the zigs and zags on their almond-sized shells, are native to Eurasia, and are thought to have first arrived in North America in the late 1980s as stowaways on ships lumbering across the Great Lakes. government wants the mollusks gone, one mangled moss ball at a time. Pet stores in 32 American states were recently found to be selling moss balls studded with zebra mussels, Dreissena polymorpha, and the U.S. ![]()
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