Rogue Boat with Insidious Cargo ...

In the middle of March, officials in California sent a message to states north warning abouta pontoon boat from Montana that was potentially packing an insidious cargo.

The boat had spent some time in Lake Havasu, where invasive quagga mussels are known to lurk.

Rogue Boat Incident


I didn't think too much about this story at first ... until I started down this 'rabbit hole':

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This subspecies is indigenous to the Dnieper River drainage of Ukraine.

Wikipedia: Quagga mussel

Now there is a new and serious threat.

Imagine a future where going to your favorite rock-skipping beach, you find the shoreline matted with tens of thousands of small mussel shells, with everything cemented together in a sharp, smelly mess.

Imagine once productive fisheries wiped out by these new invaders.

It's not science fiction, impacts are already occurring in waters in the Great Lakes, eastern provinces and states, the prairies and plains, and more recently in the southwest United States.

National Park Service:
Help Stop Aquatic Invasive Species


Google Images: "Quagga mussels"

Google News: "Quagga mussels"

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OPINION:

Western-U.S. ... 'Asymmetric Water Issues'.

( and/or what else could go wrong? )
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Them damn Ruskies.

Why are they invading Oregon lakes? Is Putin out on some epic fishing expedition?

a reply to: FarleyWayne
I wonder if they are edible?

Could make massive vats of "clam" chowder...

Mmmmmm

Is Russia flexing it's Mussels again?

originally posted by: rickymouse
Is Russia flexing it's Mussels again?

Wow...that was perfectly executed...LOL

originally posted by: rickymouse
Is Russia flexing it's Mussels again?

Ya that's pretty darn funny.....Thanks for that. Also I live up in the US Siberia....Wisconsin and the DNR are really worried about things like this.

There musselling in then!

a reply to: FarleyWayne

I have seen warning signs on reservoir's for a few years and the park employees take this very seriously payroling the boat ramp like hawks.

Socal has one natural lake Crystal Lake near Azusa. The bad news is has length of 100 yards, width 50 yards...a pond in any other State..

originally posted by: Darkblade71
a reply to: FarleyWayne
I wonder if they are edible?

Could make massive vats of "clam" chowder...

Mmmmmm

Yes, but....

Although quaggas are edible for humans, eating them is not recommended due to the accumulation of toxins, pollutants, and microorganisms within the mussels' bodies.[

Wikipedia: Quagga Mussel

a reply to: butcherguy

Figures.

Well, maybe they will make good water filters then.

Up here around the great lakes there are already warning signs all over all of the lakes to watch out for and remove any mussels that are found. You are not allowed to empty your live wells into any lake other than where you got the water, and the same goes for minnow buckets.

I think here they call them Zebra mussels, I wonder if they are the same ones or just another invasive species?

Edit:

Went and checked, different species, same area that they come from.

The zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) is a small freshwater mussel. This species was originally native to the lakes of southern Russia,[2] being first described in 1769 by the German zoologist Peter Simon Pallas in the Ural, Volga and Dnieper rivers. These mussels are still found nearby, as Pontic (Black Sea) and Caspian species.[3] However, the zebra mussel has been accidentally introduced to numerous other areas, and has become an invasive species in many different countries worldwide. Zebra mussels get their name from a striped pattern which is commonly seen on their shells, though it is not universally present. They are usually about the size of a fingernail, but can grow to a maximum length of nearly 2 in (5.1 cm).[4][5] Shells are D-shaped, and attached to the substrate with strong byssal threads, which come out of their umbo on the dorsal (hinged) side.

Three color varieties of the shell of the zebra mussel Close-up of a typical shell of a zebra mussel Zebra mussels and the closely related and ecologically similar quagga mussels are filter-feeding organisms. They remove particles from the water column. The zebra mussels process up to one liter of water per day, per mussel.[6] Some particles are consumed as food, and feces are deposited on the lake floor. Non-food particles are combined with mucus and other matter and deposited on lake floors as pseudofeces. Since the zebra mussel has become established in Lake Erie, water clarity has increased from 6 inches to up to three feet in some areas.[7] This improved water clarity allows sunlight to penetrate deeper, enabling growth of submerged macrophytes. These plants, when decaying, wash up on shorelines, fouling beaches and causing water quality problems.[8]

en.wikipedia.org...

Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Time to clam up. These mussels are a shell of a problem and require our serious attention. Everything is hinging on this. So, let's not be shellfish. Let's give this post credit for the pearl of wisdom that it is.

Seems like these seem to be the kind of critters you would need to put in cages, allowed to breed and used filter out those tiny plastic pellets out of the plastic waste dumps in the center of the oceans.

They absorb pollutants but exude toxic slime ...