Word: zebras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
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...