Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Wildlife Management Possible solution to combat the Zebra Mussel

Biologist discovers how to kill zebra mussels



Biologist has discovered a safe way to kill the Great Lakes' silent invaders.

Article by: ROBERT H. BOYLE , New York Times

March 1, 2014

Since they arrived in the Great Lakes in the 1980's, two species of mussels the size of pistachios have spread to hundreds of lakes and rivers in 34 states and have done vast economic and ecological damage.

These silent invaders, the quagga and zebra mussels, have disrupted ecosystems by devouring phytoplankton, the foundation of the marine food web, and have clogged the water intakes and pipes of cities and towns, power plants, factories and even irrigated golf courses.

Now the mussels may have met their match: Daniel P. Molloy, an emeritus biologist at the New York State Museum in Albany, N.Y. and a self-described "Bronx boy who became fascinated by things living in water."

Inspired by Rachel Carson�s "Silent Spring" in high school, Molloy, 66, became a pioneer in the development of environmentally safe control agents to replace broad-spectrum chemical pesticides.

Leading a team at the museum�s Cambridge Field Research Laboratory in upstate New York, he discovered a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens strain CL145A, that kills the mussels but appears to have little or no effect on other organisms.

As a result, New York state has awarded a license to Marrone Bio Innovations, a company in Davis, Calif., to develop a commercial formulation of the bacterium. The product, Zequanox, has been undergoing tests for several years, with promising results. (Molloy has no financial ties to the company.)

Zequanox killed more than 90 percent of the mussels in a test using tanks of water from Lake Carlos in Minnesota, said James Luoma, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in La Crosse, Wis. A control group of freshwater mussels was unharmed.

In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that P. fluorescens CL145A presented "little risk to nontarget organisms." The agency is now evaluating proposed open-water uses for Zequanox.

Natives of Eastern Europe in the genus Dreissena, zebra and quagga mussels began moving up the Volga River toward Western Europe 200 years ago. Highly prolific, they attach themselves to boats or any hard surface with their byssus, or beard.

They can live out of water for two weeks, and their larvae, known as veligers, use currents to colonize new waters. As many as 700,000 mussels can pile up in a square yard.

Both species are thought to have arrived in North America in the ballast of trans-Atlantic cargo ships. By 1991 they appeared in the Hudson River, and within a year there were 500 billion between Troy and West Point, said David L. Strayer, an ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.

The tiny mussels became a dominant species in the Hudson. Not even counting their shells, their total weight exceeded that of all the fish, plankton and bacteria combined, Strayer said. There were no natural enemies to keep them in check.

None, that is, except scientists like Molloy.

Failure, Molloy said, "is not an option."

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It will be a good thing if this pans out.

For sure.....

I noticed it killed 90 percent. Hopefully the survivors won't be able to adapt.

I was thining the same thing.

death and taxes

I will be supplying gammarus to lacrosse for the study this year.
I would hope for good results but am not very optimistic.
A lake is one thing but most of ours are in the rivers and get transported by fishermen when they catch and or transport minnows.
Resistance is just one more nail in the coffin for live bait.

Barry do you know in the states that are hardest hit
by Zebra Mussels if they get into a pond do they flourish
in small ponds pretty much the same as they do in large
reservoirs and rivers?

Good question! I'm waiting to see what the answer is too!

Cecil I have a pipe that runs free water into my pond from a public reservoir 5 miles away that a recent USGS test showed detected zebra mussel DNA. We hate to cut off the free water...but we may need to...or maybe it's already too late.

http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/newsmedia/releases/?req=20140121a

Mark, does it come from the Tawakoni city water or another pump? I've never heard of them in the chlorinated and treated water supply, but if they survive that, then that's big time trouble for everybody.

Just read the pdf. Does your water come from Lavon?

Al the free tap we have is from the water line that runs from Lake Tawakoni water to the Wills Point Water Suply. It dates back to when they ran the water supply pipe to the City of Wills Point and crossed over our land and gave each land owner a "free tap" for life. Pretty nice having FREE water for life. But that water must be "Zebra Free"!....ha ha

I e-mailed today the Texas Parks & Wildlife guy that wrote the article I linked...and good gravy he already answered my e-mail. Texas Parks & Wildlife RULES! That is awesome customer service to respond within an hour! Here is the e-mail we exchanged this afternoon: His answers are in BOLD.

Dear Brian,

I read your recent article about Zebra Mussel DNA being found in Lake Tawakoni. We have some property a few miles away from Lake Tawakoni in Wills Point, Tx. We have a water tap for Lake Tawakoni water that dates back to when they ran the water supply pipe to the City of Wills Point and crossed over our land.

My question is do Zebra Mussels affect small ponds in exactly the same way they do large rivers and lakes? If they became established in your pond then yes they would impact it much the same as a larger reservoir. However, there are certain environmental conditions that need to be met in order for them to survive or thrive. One is temperature so if you pond is fairly shallow and gets up to around 32 degrees C throughout the water column then they probably wouldn�t survive. Another one is calcium, if your water is soft and doesn�t have at least 10-12 mg/L concentration of calcium then they may not survive because there wouldn�t be enough calcium for them to develop their shells or at least it would keep their numbers down

Should we be concerned about Zebra Mussels coming thru the water supply pipe and invading our 4 acre pond? As of right now we don�t have any confirmation that a zebra mussel population is established in Lake Tawakoni, just because we had a positive PCR hit for their DNA it doesn�t mean the lake is infested or that a population has become established.

Or do they treat or block the Zebra at the point where the pipe intersects the lake so the Zebra does not get into the water supply pipe going for treatment in Wills Point? I don�t know if they treat their water at the intake or not, more than likely they don�t, but that would be a good question for the City of Wills Point.

Texas Parks & Wildlife
Inland Fisheries
Management Region 2

Brian Van Zee, Regional Director
E-mail: [email protected]

1601 E. Crest Dr.
Waco, Texas 76705
Telephone (254) 867-7974

OK, I'll give TPWD props for the quick response.

So, if a pond tests positive does that mean no Lime? Isn't it a calcium?

ZM will flourish in any body of water that has a suitable food supply. The populations will build and fail based on available food sources. While they would do well in some waters (eutrophic) they find limited populations in oligotrophic waters.
In a manmade pond that would without aeration winterkill the winterkill would reduce or eliminate populations depending on the severity and duration of the anoxic conditions.
Size is less of an issue than fertility. Spring ponds with clear water support limited populations.

Now AL you know I am a rookie and will always be!...so I can't answer that question, but I am sure people like Cecil and esshup, ect...probably can.

Al this could be good news for you and bad news for me?

Dr. Robert McMahon, Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Texas at Arlington, says that while this news is of concern, he suspects that Lake Fork cannot sustain a zebra mussel population because of low levels of calcium, which the mussels use to construct their shells. He believes that Lake Tawakoni is likely more susceptible.

The best effort to slow the spread of these invasives is to educate the public. What they don't know will hurt them.
This should have been implemented as soon as they were found on inland waters.

They never do that! Here in the Great Lakes when the VHS virus showed up, APHIS immediately shut down the transportation between fish farms and made us then do expensive fish health inspections to this day. Never mind the virus had never been found on a fish farm and probably never will be!

In the meantime when I told an angler it wouldn't be a good idea to bring some smallies from Lake Erie to his pond, and it was illegal, he didn't know anything about the virus!

Most of the anglers I talked to thought VHS was just a type of video tape.

So much for getting the word out to the folks that are most likely to spread something via their live wells.

Gentlemen,

I got the following from a couple of sources via email. I didn't include their names as I don't think they're aware I'm posting this on the Internet.




From what I was able to find recently and from following this product (Zequanox) it is still being tested for open water treatments it shows 85-90% effectiveness in closed industrial applications but is a more expensive alternative although more ecologically friendly than say chlorine. A better delivery method for open water applications is a necessity, I heard a while ago that SePRO 3-4 yrs back was involved with them to develop a delivery granule to attach the natural pathogen to but now they have parted ways which tells me that SePRO wasn't seeing the success.



The science behind the product not causing adverse effects to the natural fauna is looking good although still not complete enough for the EPA to permit open water use outside of these trials. Someone could spend lots of money to treat a body of water just to have it reinfested again in the future due to so many ZM populations out there. The price tag at this stage would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars +. I would be cautious about this product being hailed as a solution or an eradication method it will be at best a tool to potentially protect native mussels in critical habitats or a rapid response tool to a confined local.



I you have too much time on your hands I found a 40 min presentation from the discoverer of this bacteria -http://www.minnesotawaters.org/content/zebra-mussel-collection-zequanoxtm-efficacy-evaluation-douglas-county

SePRO even tested this product in one body of water in Indiana a few years back...Phillips Quarry in Muncie. In my conversations with SePRO they killed a lot of ZM's but not all of them. Like he said, SePRO severing ties with Zequanox says something about their thoughts of a successful product.

Did anyone see this? Using Potassium Chloride to treat zebras in a quarry.

http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/zebramussels/

Thanks Cecil...that's some great info.

"How long will this treatment protect
the quarry from zebra mussel infestation?"

"Potassium will provide long-term (estimated at up to
33 years) protection of Millbrook Quarry against future
infestation by zebra mussels"

33 years works for me! WOW!

You can do the same thing with CO2 in under ice applications.
But it will only work in a closed system of pond. Heck of a lot cheaper too. I have been working to get Natural Resources here to get the EPA to ok it's use as a piscicide for under ice use.
Natural, No residuals, soluble in water and effective. I just don't have the 300,000. to license it.

Years ago when Zebra Mussels first appeared in polluted lake Erie I remember airline pilots flying over the lake were saying how clear the lake had become. I thought at the time the Zebra's might be a solution to water pollution. Before the Zebra's showed up in Erie I was on a charter boat fishing for Walleye and between two charter boats we had, only 5 Walleye were caught. The captains blamed the low Walleye catch on the continuing high pollution of the lake.

The article below thinks the high potassium runoff from farms caused the pollution do to high rains and are responsible for the potassium run off into the lake, creating algae. Probably what is true is the zebras are filtering the water of algae caused by the potassium and thus increasing the oxygen content needed for walleye to thrive. The author was talking of bad pollution levels in 1970, I was fishing in Erie in the late 1950's, so the problem of the polluted lake Erie Walleye population had been going on for a long time. Just my uneducated guess. So

Lake Erie�s polluted past returning with a vengeance
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/...-vengeance.html

Now it seems Phosphorous levels are high and causing blue green algae in Erie. What I believe is happening is that nearly every farm is putting in plastic pipe underground ditching so excess water runs off the fields immediately and this water all runs into the rivers at the same time which increases yields but also flushes nutrients into the streams. This is true in East Central Indiana.

Looking at the map, surely they must have somehow made it into ponds or lakes. I wonder what happens then. Besides the RES getting fat.

I've never heard of potassium feeding algae but maybe Cody can shed some light on that. Definitely phosphorus as you indicate above.

I do know Lake Erie was all but dead when I was in junior high and high school, and folks can say what the want about the Clean Water Act but I think it saved the lake.

I'm getting some behemoth walleye from Lake Erie right now caught on the ice and limit catches. I've been told the ice is 18 inches double digit miles out.