Word: zebra
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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...
Perhaps the only realistic outcome at this time is a transitional one, to what one deeply involved Western diplomat calls a "zebra-striped government." Says he: "Power sharing with a real share for the blacks is definitely on offer in the next phase. A surrender of white power is not." But, he adds, once that first hurdle is surmounted, South Africa will be poised for the final jump. "The next constitution," says this diplomat, "will not be the ultimate constitution...
...owner of Vincent on Camelback, has developed a line of "heart-smart" game entrees. Once chefs % had to scramble to find a brace of partridge or pheasant. Not anymore. Game suppliers and game farms have sprung up across the country to meet the demand for everything from antelope to zebra. D'Artagnan in Jersey City sells two kinds of venison and four different varieties of duck, as well as fresh grouse, wood pigeon and pheasant from Scotland. Five years ago, D'Artagnan was pulling in $500,000 annually; this year it will do $7 million in business...