Ecosystems can be shattered, molded, and reformed, often irreversibly, with the introduction of an invasive species. Few have messed up so many waterways quite so thoroughly as this teeny little striped filter feeder.
Today’s Moment of Science… the tiniest titan, the zebra mussel.
One of many invasive species with a case of “doesn’t share well with others,” zebra mussels have been little bastards since the day they left their native habitat in the Black and Caspian Seas. First setting eyes on the critter, it’s hard to picture it causing an ecological disaster. This adorable thing? They max out at two inches, tops, and can be as small as a quarter of an inch long. It’s just too darned cute to fuck up absolutely everything it touches, obviously.
Have you ever seen the Star Trek episode ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’?
The trouble is that it’s never just one tribble.
Zebra mussels are like that but no transporter to solve the problem.
The honor of the phrase ‘breed like rabbits’ should more aptly have been bestowed upon these itsy fuckers. They typically live for about five years (but have been observed living as long as fifteen years). In their second year of life, they start producing offspring. Female mussels typically produce half a million to a million eggs a year.
Don’t get too relieved when you hear that only two percent of their eggs reach adulthood.
Drop zebra mussel Adam and Eve into a brand new lake, and say they live for long enough to breed for a full five years, busting out so many babies you’d think they’re trying to get a show on TLC. At a million fertilized embryos per year, with a 2% survival rate, you get about 20,000 adults.
That’s 100,000 zebra mussels in five years.
You’re just a few generations away from several quadrillion of these petite motherfuckers clogging up pipes, competing for resources, and permanently tipping an ecosystem in its favor.
They go through a familiar infestation cycle. They have a population boom, and as filter feeders they suck out toxins from the water, which is pretty neat. But they’re each capable of filtering about a liter of water a day, and with so many of them, the zebra mussels often wipe out phytoplankton from a body of water, a vital food source for other native species.
Out-competing other filter-feeders for resources is one way they disrupt a local population. Another is that they’ll use the shells of other mollusks for a stable surface to latch onto. Thousands of these pint sized jerks latch onto one native mussel, weighing it down, stopping it from moving or feeding, and eventually leading to its death.
This was a man made disaster, but also an inevitable one in a connected world.
Canals granted the mussels a route to additional European waterways, giving them their first appearance in Hungary by the late 1700s. They slowly spread across Europe over the course of the 1800s, causing a smidge of a ruckus.
By 1988, they were first reported in North America in Lake St. Clair, and have made a continuing ecological disaster out of themselves in lakes across North America since then. Zebra mussels are known to be in thirty-one states today. They are currently wreaking havoc in the Great Lakes, with Lake Michigan going through a particularly rough experience.
Damage from zebra mussels costs approximately one billion dollars to manage in the US annually. Currently, there are a few plans to manage them, but if we’re being honest, they all suck.
This has been your daily Moment of Science reminding you that sometimes shit doesn’t work out and it’s nobody’s fault.
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