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DOW officials inspect boats for mussels
Herald Staff Writer
Photo by NICK MANNING/Herald
Jake Ballard, with Division of Wildlife, shows a bag of mussels pulled off a boat at Vallecito Reservoir on Sunday. Jake and his partner, Jim Greffly, were checking boats at Vallecito for signs of the mussels.
Clusters of quagga mussels, native to the Caspian and Black seas in Eurasia, were discovered during an inspection by diligent marina owner Richard Noe of Sims Marina, who may have prevented a full-scale regional ecological emergency.
"The state of New Mexico should give that guy an award," said Jake Ballard, a Colorado Division of Wildlife aquatic nuisance species inspector.
Ballard and partner Jim Greffly were sitting by the boat launch near Doc's Marina at Vallecito Reservoir on a busy, sunny Sunday at the end of a three-day weekend. The two were looking for the invasive quagga and zebra mussels, stopping boaters as they set out and inspecting hulls, motors, holds, intakes and even the boat trailers.
"They've been making their way across the country, basically, stuck to the bottom of boats," Ballard said.
Filter feeders, the mussels attach to hard surfaces and draw nutrients from phytoplankton in passing currents, displacing the small fish at the bottom of a lake's food chain in the process. The mussels also can help pave the way for algae to establish and assert themselves.
And with one female able to lay as many as 1 million eggs in her lifetime, it doesn't take long to feel the effects, either. The dam walls at infected Lake Mead in Arizona and Nevada are scraped free of mussels daily. Stuck under the Navajo Lake houseboat were rows of several generations of quagga mussels, six inches thick in places.
"You can mitigate the problem with physical labor, but other than that, there's not much you can do," said Ballard.
So far, Lake Granby, Shadow Mountain Reservoir, Jumbo Lake, Grand Lake, Pueblo Reservoir and Tarryall Lake have been infected in Colorado, with Lake Pleasant and Lake Mohave testing positive in Arizona.
A veteran of law enforcement, Greffly said some boaters appear nervous during inspections, perhaps because of lapsed registrations or other minor offenses. Even if he wanted to, he said, he can't write tickets for bad behavior.
"We feel education really is the key with this," he said.
Though the mollusks readily will attach to trailered boats that spend days in the water at a time, they prefer concrete dam walls for the calcium they provide. The mussels quickly can clog dam intakes as wide as 8 inches. The problem then can spread farther downstream from an infected lake, with the mussels taking over public-water intakes and spreading to other bodies of water.
The consequences of a mussel invasion wouldn't just be devastating on the ecological landscape; gating off boat ramps at the height of tourist season would have a disastrous impact on Vallecito's financial health, as well.
As more locals spend more vacation days near home because of the recession, Doc's Marina owner Stan Folsom said, so far, he's been enjoying the busiest season he's seen at the lake since the Missionary Ridge Fire shut down Vallecito for the 2002 season and claimed more than 70,000 acres and 46 homes.
Folsom said that with the health of his business on the line, he's relieved to see the DOW inspectors checking boats outside.
"It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It's scary."
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