Word: zebra
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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...
...utilities and industries, the zebra mussel represents one of the biggest maintenance challenges next to corrosion. Detroit Edison, for example, has spent $500,000 cleaning the critters from the cooling system of its Monroe power plant. "Our plant," says superintendent Sam Smolinski, "has turned into a zebra-mussel nursery. Frankly, we can't fathom things getting any worse...
Foreign organisms have invaded the Great Lakes before, but few have engendered such apprehension. "The zebra mussel is a keystone species," says zoologist David Garton of Ohio State University. "It has the power to restructure the entire ecological community." The zebra mussel can strip water of algae and other microscopic plants and thus endanger animal life. Native clams are beginning to die off, victims of the zebra mussels' habit of attaching to clamshells in such numbers that they cannot open...
Still, with a little luck (and an increase in predation by native fish like the freshwater drum), the zebra mussel may yet be brought under control. In fact, some evidence suggests that the mussel population in Lake Erie may have peaked. "There are many ways to kill the zebra mussel," observes Ohio State entomologist Susan Fisher. "The trick is to do it selectively" without wiping out other aquatic life. Fisher has recently found that minute traces of potassium, nontoxic to other organisms, reliably send zebra mussels into fatal shock. Paints laced with potassium, she speculates, might protect underwater structures from...
...understand this talk of killing," counters biologist Anna Stanczkowska-Piotrowska of Poland's Agricultural-Pedagogical University. The zebra mussel, she points out, is not without virtues. Its byssuses extrude an adhesive that may have commercial value. Its appetite for foul-smelling algae can markedly sweeten the taste of drinking water. Perhaps most admirable of all, the zebra mussel has performed an act of public service by dramatizing the threat posed by tiny organisms that hitch rides around the world. Both the U.S. and Canada are moving to restrict the discharge of ballast water into the Great Lakes, a measure...