They’re small enough for several to fit into the palm of one’s hand, but they can have a huge effect, causing damages in the millions of dollars.

They’re quagga mussels, and their discovery in Lake Mead this year prompted a broad alliance of government agencies throughout the West to launch a surveillance, control and interdiction strategy against a determined invader.
Quagga mussels can wreak havoc on water supply operations and on the ecology of lakes and reservoirs. They deplete the food source and create a barren environment in which fish and other fresh water and sea life cannot exist, if left unchecked.

Up until this year, this cousin of the zebra mussel had been little known in the West, outside of a small circle of water and aquatic experts who had been nervously eyeing the mussels’ progress within the Great Lakes region, where they had been proliferating for years after being inadvertently introduced through the ballasts of ocean-going ships in the 1980s.

The key line of defense was the 100th Meridian Initiative, a multi-agency, multi-state effort formed in the hope that it could keep quagga and zebra mussels from spreading beyond the 100th Meridian, the U.S. line of longitude separating East from West. It included a volunteer monitoring program that operated throughout the western United States.
Despite these efforts, quagga mussels have rapidly spread in the Southwestern U.S. and have been detected in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California.

On January 6, 2007, one of those 100th Meridian volunteers discovered quagga mussels in Lake Havasu, marking the first time that the mussel had been found in the Lower Colorado River.

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