Rubin: We're outnumbered by zebra mussels. Where they may be headed next

Ceci Weibert first saw zebra mussels on a third grade field trip, clinging to a rock in their persistent and environmentally menacing way.

Now she's knee deep, or sometimes even fully submerged, in trying to control them. It's a slow process; one estimate puts their population in the Great Lakes alone at 750 trillion.

She remains optimistic though. And reassuring, after what seemed like dire zebra mussel news last month from the Rocky Mountains.

And very much a believer in the power of field trips.

"As a kid, you're just happy to get out of school," said Weibert, 31. "You never know what's going to spark a lifelong interest."

A smart and inquisitive child from suburban Erie, Pennsylvania, for instance, might earn two degrees in marine affairs and policy, and become the Aquatic Invasive Species Program Coordinator for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.

She might surface as the go-to for updates on zebra mussels and their close cousins, quagga mussels, which have been clogging pipes, disrupting the food chain and choking off more likable and valuable native species since the late 1980s.

She'll know what constitutes progress, and what's cause for panic, and what isn't, at least not yet.

"We continue to find a handful of infested lakes new to us," Weibert said, "but not at a really high rate. I think last year we had two or three new ones."

That's a positive. So is better understanding of the most effective ways to use a pesticide called Zequanox that has been available to harass zebra mussels for the past seven or eight years.

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What's alarming is the specimen that turned up in the Colorado River, high on the western slope of the Rockies —but only potentially.

The downside of dying

For a decade or two after their discovery in Lake St. Clair, zebra mussels were the hot environmental topic in Michigan, the first name in destructive alien organisms.

They've been drowned out a bit of late as other menaces have surfaced . Asian carp, for instance, or global warming in general, or evils as small as the spotted lanternfly and visible as 15-foot-tall stalks of knotweed.

As a brief reminder, zebra mussels are believed to have traveled here in the ballast from European freighters. Typically described as the size of fingernails, they reproduce madly, with females disgorging as many as a million eggs during a spawn.

They stick to any hard surface, including boat hulls, one another, larger mollusks and industrial intake pipes, a habit that costs utilities billions of dollars in scraping and removal. They devour the plankton other species depend on, ruin breeding grounds, and sometimes form clusters so large they kill themselves off — which isn't as positive a development as it seems.

“We’re starting to see this boom and bust cycle,” Weibert said, where a population consumes all the plankton in its area and then starts to die.

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The problem is that as they expire, they release phosphorus that’s believed to help fuel harmful algae blooms. Sometimes you can't win for oozing.

Putting the muscle on mussels

Zebra mussels were spotted in a small western Colorado lake less than two years ago, probably delivered inadvertently by someone who didn't properly wash a small boat.

Then in July, testers with microscopes found single veligers, or larvae, in an irrigation canal and the Colorado River near Grand Junction. The general manager of a local water authority called the discovery "devastating," with potential ramifications that "cannot be underestimated or overstated."

The notion of zebra mussels spreading all the way to the Gulf of Mexico is jarring, Weibert agreed, but a few larvae don't necessarily mean calamity.

There might not be enough for a foothold, she said. The veligers might wind up as food for local fish, a deserving irony, or be otherwise damaged.

"They have a pretty good system in place out there," she said, which answered what seemed like a logical question: Did anyone in Colorado call counterparts in Michigan for advice?

At this point, Weibert said, every region has an organization and an action plan focused on zebras and quaggas. Boaters everywhere should know the same drill — inspect and wash vessels, trailers and anything else that has had contact with water. Drain bilge water, live wells and bait buckets. Don't forget to check the engine, and don't let the wash water make its way to storm sewers or bodies of water.

In Colorado, she said, police and decontamination stewards can be dispatched to watch with stern faces while boaters clean their equipment. That's not the case in Michigan, but other things are afoot here.

Studies have found that Zequanox works best when it's applied beneath a tarp spread over the zebra mussels. Projects are underway to push back the invaders at several reefs favored by whitefish as breeding grounds. There's research into biogenetic controls that might, for instance, sterilize male mussels.

Scientists are woefully outnumbered, Weibert conceded. We don't have trillions of them, and the labs working on the problem don't have trillions of dollars.

No kid on a field trip, though, ever gazed across Lake Erie and dreamed of challenges that couldn't be tackled.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rubin: We're outnumbered by zebra mussels. Where they may be headed next