Quagga Mussels "Everywhere" In Lake Mead - 80 To 160 Mussels For Every Gallon Of Water [View all]

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Each mussel is usually no bigger than a man's thumbnail, but their dense and fast-growing colonies have caused billions of dollars in damage and preventive maintenance costs in the Great Lakes region and elsewhere in the eastern half of the country. Wong says quaggas are native to the Ukraine, but have spread across Europe. They arrived in the Great Lakes in the early 1980s, most likely in the ballast water of a ship.

Left unchecked, they can clog water pipelines, power plant cooling systems and marine equipment. Wong believes the mussels likely arrived in Lake Mead sometime before the summer of 2005, at least 18 months before anyone noticed them.

Until then, the bivalve mollusk with the striped shell had never been found west of the Mississippi River. They have since spread to lakes Mohave and Havasu downstream from Hoover Dam and into water systems in California and Arizona.

Wong says two dozen reservoirs in the San Diego area now have quaggas in them. They were likely delivered there as babies in water released from Lake Mead and diverted to Southern California.

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http://www.lvrj.com/news/quagga-mussels-spread-creates-quandary-154984825.html