Word: mussel
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...movie, a marauding mollusk would probably be played by a giant clam. But the real-life monster swimming amuck in the Great Lakes is a tiny creature the size of a fingernail. With its jaunty brown stripes, a solitary zebra mussel looks cute, not threatening. The trouble is that the animal is anything but a loner, and its tendency to form colonies of thousands, even millions, makes it threatening indeed...
Unknown in North America until 1988, the zebra mussel has become a pest whose exploding population has prompted alarming predictions of millions of dollars' worth of damage to water-supply systems and the ruination of the sport-fishing industry. A year ago, the city of Monroe, Mich., lost its water supply for two full days because intake lines were plugged with zebra mussels. Earlier, Ford Motor's casting plant in Windsor, Ont., found the creatures choking off the flow of cooling water to its furnaces. Boaters, meanwhile, have watched their hulls and engines become encrusted with mussels...
Native to the Caspian Sea region of the Soviet Union, the zebra mussel spread into the canals, rivers and lakes of Western Europe more than 150 years ago. Then sometime in 1986, biologists speculate, a European cargo ship bound for Sarnia, Ont., emptied some of the water it carried as ballast into Lake St. Clair, between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. Biologists first spotted a few zebra mussels in the area three years ago -- and the race...
Every year each female mussel produces approximately 30,000 eggs. When fertilized, these eggs hatch into microscopic larvae that swirl with the current. Eventually the larvae find a surface to their liking and settle down, mooring themselves with sticky, hairlike threads called byssuses. They reach sexual maturity in massive colonies that pack as many mussels into a square meter as there are inhabitants in a midsize town...
Virtually unchallenged by natural predators, billions of zebra-mussel larvae left their initial colonies in Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie and drifted into Lake Ontario. By attaching themselves to boats, some adventuresome mussels even managed to move upstream into Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Similar outriders are expected to start showing up in smaller lakes and major rivers such as the Mississippi, the Susquehanna and the Hudson. "Within 20 years," predicts Margaret Dochoda, a biologist with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, "the zebra mussel will likely have taken the entire East Coast...