State fisheries scientists announced that zebra mussels had been discovered

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WB Staff
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State fisheries scientists announced that zebra mussels had been discovered

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state fisheries scientists announced that zebra mussels had been discovered.jpg
Invasive zebra mussels, now found in five Texas river basins, encrust and suffocate a pair of native clams. The alien bivalves, which explode in population in their new homes, can cripple freshwater ecosystems by out-competing beneficial native clams and consuming massive amounts of nutrients necessary to support native fish and other aquatic life.
Photo: Lon Horwedel, MBR / Associated Press


Few Austin-area residents, or many people in the rest of Texas for that matter, paid much attention in the summer of 2017 when state fisheries scientists announced that zebra mussels had been discovered colonizing Lake Travis.

After all, the 19,000-acre Colorado River reservoir a bit upstream from the capital city and popular with recreational boaters and anglers was just the latest in a growing string of Texas reservoirs and river systems that the fingernail-size, non-native mollusks had invaded since first being discovered in the state eight years earlier. And while fisheries biologists and water managers offered somber warnings about the environmental and economic devastation the small bivalves could wreak, such threats easily could be ignored as overblown or immaterial to the average Austinite’s life. It was just a little mussel. What damage could it do?

They got a hint earlier this month when folks in much of Austin cracked their kitchen faucets or turned on their showers and the reality of this invasive species’ wide-ranging, multifaceted negative impacts was, quite literally, brought home

read the rest: https://www.chron.com/sports/outdoors/a ... 622846.php
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