Exotic mussel found on boat hull in Dayton
Hey savvy news reader! Thanks for choosing local.
You are now reading
3 of 3 free articles.
DAYTON — Waldo never hid this well.
A quagga mussel, known also as an aquatic hitchhiker, an invasive species and a deadly threat to Montana’s lakes and rivers, made it more than 1,000 miles, through four states and two boat inspections before it was finally discovered Saturday, March 5, on a sailboat at Dayton Yacht Harbor. By that time, the quarter-inch-long adult mussel had moved from its hiding spot to the boat’s hull. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Regional Aquatic Invasive Species coordinator John Wachsmuth and volunteer Erik Hanson, a certified mussel inspector, found the single mussel, which appeared to be intact and alive, attached to the stern of the hull, according to an FWP news release.
While Wachsmuth and Hanson were able to intercept the boat before it contaminated Flathead Lake, they wouldn’t have known about the possible threat if someone in Idaho hadn’t realized the boat wasn’t thoroughly inspected there. The sailboat had passed through an Idaho Department of Transportation checkpoint on March 4, and before that had been decontaminated at its origin of Lake Mead along the Arizona-Nevada state line, where quagga mussels are firmly established after first appearing in 2007. Thanks to a warning phone call from Columbia River Basin Network inspectors, Wachsmuth and Hanson knew to inspect the boat when it arrived in Dayton. After another decontamination, the boat is now in dry dock and won’t be launched for at least two months, according to FWP.
The incident illustrates perfectly how easily Montana’s waters could be invaded by unwanted species, Flathead Basin Commission executive director Caryn Miske noted at the group’s meeting Wednesday. The boat had been cleaned on the outside but obviously not enough attention was paid to its insides at the Lake Mead decontamination, Miske explained.
“Chances are the boat probably was clean (on the outside) when Idaho inspected it,” she said. “I think (Idaho) did fumble (the inspection) a little bit, but they corrected it by what happened after.”
Due to the ever-increasing threat of mussel invasion, anglers participating in the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ Mack Days fishing tournament, which started Friday, can expect to have their boats examined before entering Flathead Lake, CSKT fisheries biologist Barry Hansen said.
“We’re gonna try and inspect every boat we can,” he said.
Trained boat inspectors will be stationed at fish pick-up sites around the lake, concentrating especially on Blue Bay, where most anglers put in during Mack Days. Since Montana remains mussel-free, Hansen’s main concern is people bringing boats in from out of state. But most Mack Days anglers are pre-registered, and CSKT has already notified everyone coming from a distance that their boats must be decontaminated, Hansen added.
“If anyone locally has taken their boat out of the area, they need to be sure it’s cleaned,” he said.
In January, DNA tests on what FWP termed “suspicious samples” of larvae from Flathead Lake were inconclusive for exotic mussels, and a team of United States Geological Survey divers found no mussels in a two-day search of the lake’s northern end.
Exotic mussels such as quaggas and their close cousins, zebra mussels, reproduce very rapidly and clog filters and water intake pipes and pumps, coat boat propellers and steal nutrients from native invertebrates, fish and wildlife. According to the USGS, zebra and quagga mussels have caused more than $5 billion in damage in the Great Lakes Basin alone.
The creatures first arrived in the U.S. in the late 1980s, when one commercial cargo ship traveling from the Black Sea (the native home of both mussel species) to the Great Lakes released larval zebra mussels during a ballast exchange.
