Harvest, cook, can, sell................
Posted on 11/20/2008 10:52:25 AM PST by NormsRevenge
SALT LAKE CITY – Trouble-making zebra mussels have arrived in Utah. But not where they were expected to show up.
Electric Lake is Utah's first body of water where the damaging, nonnative mussels have been confirmed, state wildlife officials said Wednesday.
The officials said they were surprised the fast-spreading mussels appeared there first because it's a high-elevation lake with relatively few boaters. It is boaters who sometimes unknowingly transport the mussels from lake to lake on their crafts.
Most expected the mussels to show up first at Lake Powell.
The mussels "showed up in one of the least-expected places," said Larry Dalton, aquatic invasive species coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. "That's how bewildering this little devil is."
Zebra mussels and their cousins, quagga mussels, were inadvertently introduced into the Great Lakes about 20 years ago. They reproduce and spread rapidly, threatening food sources for fish and clogging machinery and water pipes.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
These guys can be tough on power plant cooling water intakes.
Yeah, they really do overpopulate.
But on the other hand, they really do clean up the water too.
They’re trying to mussel in on the territory.
I suspect sabotage. Didn't Dick Cheney find some zebra mussels in his pace maker?
Can they be eaten?..............
0bama’s fault
ahhh, I don’t see any recipes,, but.. ;-)
Harvest, cook, can, sell................
They’re screwed.
A couple thousand for a meal, I would guess.
Yea who cares though!
Enviro whacko’s need to shut up and accept that this is the return species we are replacing for destroting the 8 Toed German Field Mouse or some other such nonsense.
If they area problem for the power plants, then come with a deadly to clam solution and can the crying.
Protein is protein........
Put them in a press and use the squished parts for soup at high end restaraunts...
Too bad they’re too tiny to be eaten. Are they edible anyway?
They will eventually be in every lake since boaters go from lake to lake without thoroughly cleaning their boats.
A guy I graduated HS with up in Michigan became a professional diver, their company made a fortune cleaning out the Cook county nuke plant intake pipes over in lake Michigan, and the intake pipes near Detroit were an almost continuous contract for them. A few years out of HS and he had a house, new car and was doing really well, all thanks to those little buggers.
One of the biggest problems with zebra mussels is they clean the water so well that seaweed and grasses explode from the sunlight getting down so deep, a major problem in itself when the shorelines start looking like the Sargasso sea.
They are a big problem in the Great Lakes Region.
These little bastages clogged and messed up the water intake on my sailboat. They spread like wildfire and multiple like free-lovin’ liberal hippy rabbits on steroids. There is no death too wicked for them. Die you little bastages, DIE!
They may be a blessing in disguise. When the Famine Times come, they will be very welcome.....................
One more time, in English.
Yup.
Most can’t even imagine how it would be if they went four or five days without a meal.
By then, they’d be ready to eat shoe leather boiled with a couple onions.
I guarantee if I had about a quart of them things, I could make a very, very tasty soup or stew.
Let’s find something that eats them and turn a bunch of that loose in the lake.
Are these heat seeking mussels?
Beat me with the pic by a minute!
Batter fry them and leave the crunchy “shells” on.
I guar-ron-teee that cajuns will eat any'ting!
Are you drinking?
Nothing is too tiny.
Make a paste...
A local Chinese restaurant serves a clam soup with clams in shells about the same exact size of those mussels.......
“Let’s find something that eats them and turn a bunch of that loose in the lake.”
Hey! Yeah! Let’s ;et the Lampreys back in! Really, we should genetically modify them to grow huge, and solve the World’s food shortages.
LOL!!!............. They are apparently Stealth Cruise Mussels!.............
They eat by filtering the water. They are so effective that if the body of water they are in is at all polluted they become concentrated depositories of the pollutants that they absorb.
Too small to make a harvestable meal for anything but the few smaller species that feed on them, many of which are poisoned.
They entered the Great Lakes from ballast water of overseas vessels.
I don’t really know if they are less of a problem overseas due to natural predators, but here they really impact lakes and waterways and will be a problem for power plants, boats in those waters, sluce gates and locks and existing vegatation. They encrust themselves on anything as shown by the photos above. Got a bilge pump or cooling water intake on your boat, it will get clogged and it is something that requies chisels to remove.
WIKI says they can get up to two inches in size! That's eaten size!................
“WIKI says they can get up to two inches in size! That’s eaten size!....”
“can” is the important word there. In ideal conditions, maybe. But, in general, only about .ooo1% of them do. They’re all small up here in Lake Erie. Very small.
“Zebra mussels are particularly insidious in that they undermine the very foundation of the Great Lakes’ food web. Being filer feeders, zebra mussels rob fish and other organisms of the food they need. They offer nothing in return; they provide no value as a prey organism and throw the natural ecosystem out of balance. Zebra mussels are implicated in the alarming disappearance of Diporeia, a key native zooplankter that is vital to the diet of many native fish species. Zebra mussels, when they interact with round gobies, another exotic pest, help produce the conditions that move botulism up the food web, killing Great Lakes fish and birds.
“Overall, zebra mussels have cost the fishery, the economy, and the people of the region dearly. It is time to learn from the hard lessons zebra mussels have taught us,” says Gaden. “We must manage the ballast from oceangoing vessels; ballast that has permanently littered our lakes with trash species like zebra mussels.”
http://www.glu.org/english/invasive_species/zebramussel/index.htm
“Besides clogging pipes and devouring most of the available microscopic food supply, zebra mussels may present a health hazard by increasing human and wildlife exposure to organic pollutants such as PCBs and PAHs. Studies have shown that zebra mussels can accumulate the pollutants in their tissues in concentrations 300,000 times greater than in the environment. They deposit these pollutants as pseudofeces, loose pellets of mucous mixed with particulate matter that they filter from the water. Scavenging animals that eat the pseudofeces may pass these pollutants up the food chain.”
http://www.gma.org/surfing/human/zebra.html
They kill off other life in lakes by eating their food supply. Looks like the only way to remove the mussels would be if they themselves ran out of food. But by that time, all other life in lakes would have already been killed off.
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