LAKEPORT — The Lake County Invasive Species Council came up with several recommendations to the county”s quagga mussel inspection program during the its monthly meeting on Monday. The recommendations will be presented to the Lake County Board of Supervisors (BOS) later this month.
One of the recommendations will be to replace the current practice of issuing colored bands to out-of-county boaters with a sticker. The sticker would be a solid color and have a place to put a colored strip on the side. The strip would have a different color for each month. The strip would be similar to the type that is currently used on vehicle license plates. In addition all boats that are registered in the county would be required to have a new sticker as of Jan. 1, 2011. Resident stickers would be a different color than out-of-county stickers. The reason given for doing away with the current color-coded band is that authorities are having a hard time seeing the band and they also tend to become dislodged from the boat.
Water Resources Director Scott De Leon also said that he will provide the council with an accounting of all the money generated to date by the sticker program and where the funds are being spent.
Department of Fish and Game (DFG) scientist Jason Roberts told the council that the DFG has been monitoring four special structures placed in the lake for veligers (mussel larvae). The structures have a high calcium content which attracts the mussels. To date there has been no trace of the mussel or veligers being found. Carolyn Ruttan of Water Resources said the county also has 11 such structures in Clear Lake, two in Lake Pillsbury and one in Indian Valley Reservoir, and they are monitored monthly with the same results as the DFG.
Ruttan said the structures were placed at strategic locations around the lake in 2008. Roberts said the DFG has also been sampling plankton and checking dock pilings for the veligers.
According to Roberts, if a boat was infested with the quagga mussel and was launched in the lake it could take up to two years before the mussel reproduced and was detected by the structures. He also said that a high percentage of the veligers that are attached to a boat would die after being out of the water for any length of time, but if only a few survive it could be devastating to the lake”s ecosystem.
