12/8/2023 0 Comments Zebra mussels on fishIt’s going to be a long five years for Highline Lake Their poop smells bad and so do the mussels that have died off after their two-to-five-year lifespan. They can also scare off recreationists by stinking up shorelines. If that’s not enough, mussels that wash up on shore can break into razor-sharp, foot-cutting bits on beaches that normally are covered in inviting sand. The mussels also have an indirect effect on larger fish because all their vacuuming up of particles can make lake water so clear that the fish are easy pickings for birds and other visual predators. They are huge eaters, so they gobble up plankton particles that are an important part of the diet of other invertebrates and small fish. They can clog up whatever they attach to - boat motors, dam intake pipes, docks, buoys, shoreline rocks - anything under the water surface. As many as 700,000 of the mussels can crowd onto a square meter, piling atop each other and literally sticking around in hard-to-dislodge, crusty mollusk mosh pits. They start attaching to underwater surfaces by using thread-like, protein-based strands that are tipped with a super glue-grade sticky surface. Within two to three weeks of conception, those veligers start forming the distinctive zebra mussel shells that have a unique D-shaped flat-bottom and black-and-white zigzag stripes. The fertilized eggs develop into larvae called veligers, which can be transported long distances by water currents. Male mussels can release more than 200 million sperm in that same time to fertilize those eggs. Female zebra mussels can each release a million eggs into bodies of water per year. It is easy to understand how it happened. Texas, Utah, Nevada, California and now Colorado. Since then, they have spread throughout the Great Lakes and into drainages of the Mississippi River. by stowing away in the ballast of water on ships from the Caspian Sea in the late 1980s. They are believed to have come to the U.S. Zebra mussels present such huge problems in such tiny carapaces because they are so exceedingly clingy and so prolific at reproducing. But we’ve done an incredible amount of planning leading up to this, and I feel really optimistic it will work.” Breeding proliferates problems for other animals, beach health and tourist experiences It’s disappointing that we are where we are today. “I have really mixed feelings,” Walters said after a morning on the officially infested lake. Wednesday morning, in a mix of driving sleet and swirling snowflakes, a team of wildlife biologists looked like they might be the ones frozen out as they hopped into flat-bottomed jet boats and took to the diminished lake on what would normally be opening day for recreational boaters. The 563-acre Highline Lake had already been lowered this winter to 25% of its normal capacity to make mussel spotting easier and to freeze out any that might be lurking in the rocks along the shoreline. From panic into actionĪ half year of zebra-mussel headaches later - and with around a dozen more of the zebra mussel’s relatives turning up on rocks and boat slips at Highline - that plan moved into high gear this week. “I felt shocked and, yes, a little bit sick,” he said.ĬPW briefly went into panic mode before countless meetings and planning sessions would birth a battle plan - all for a bean-sized bit of shell and tissue. State invasive species program manager Robert Walters, who had been fighting mussel invaders for a decade, had a similar reaction to Martinez on that end. The invader that had likely hitched a ride to Highline on a boat, was rushed by pickup truck to CPW offices in Denver where lab tests that afternoon confirmed it was what it looked like. It represented the first infestation in Colorado, a state that, in 2008, had passed the toughest “mussel free” legislation in the country to try to prevent this kind of thing from happening. He also knew how many years of work and nail-biting worry were ahead because of this single mussel. He was well aware how much work had gone into preventing this mussel from invading Colorado for the previous 15 years. “At first, I was in denial: This can’t be happening here.” “It was sickening,” recounted Martinez, who, until that morning six months ago, had never seen a zebra mussel except in pictures. They are fond of attaching to rigid submerged objects. The pipe had been dangling there in the lake since the previous spring as part of CPW’s protocol for hunting for zebra mussels. It was clinging to a piece of PVC pipe submerged in the waters of the popular boating, swimming and camping lake that sits in the middle of Mesa County farm country not far from Colorado’s border with Utah. It was a shelled aquatic critter not much bigger than Martinez’s pinkie fingernail. Meet Colorado’s Congressional delegation.It'll take 5 years for a lake to be clear after zebra mussel was found Close
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