LAKEPORT — Lake County Water Resources Director Scott De Leon got a first hand look on what would happen to Clear Lake if the quagga mussels ever got established in Lake County. De Leon recently attended a two-day training course on quagga mussels at Lake Mead. The course was conducted by the Pacific States Marine Fishery Commission and took place at the Las Vegas Harbor.
According to De Leon the trip to Lake Mead was a real eye-opener.
“Every rope or other obstacle that touched the water was covered with quagga mussels. In fact, the mussel infestation is so bad that the slips in the marinas are equipped with hydraulic boat lifts that keep the boats out of the water when they are moored to prevent the mussels from attaching themselves to the boats,” De Leon said. “Even the beaches were completely covered with dead mussels.”
De Leon said that boat owners have been plagued with the mussels getting in the outboards and outdrives and destroying the motors. He was told that many boat owners are walking away and abandoning their vessels because they are now worthless. Lake Mead and the Colorado River supplies fresh water to Las Vegas as well as to Los Angeles and authorities told De Leon that it is costing millions of dollars to keep the pumps clean of the mussels and the mussel population keeps growing at an extremely fast rate. He said the mussels can”t be eradicated or controlled and the problem will only get worse in the coming years.
According to De Leon, the mussels were first discovered in Lake Mead in 2007 and in just three years they have spread throughout the lake, which is twice as large as Clear Lake.
De Leon said if the quagga ever got established in Clear Lake it would destroy the lake”s ecosystem. He said that contrary to what some people may think the mussels wouldn”t clear up the algae and would instead eat up the good algae and ignore the bad algae. The lake would also have more aquatic weeds and blue-green algae. The fish and bird life would also be impacted. Because the mussels would eat the phytoplankton the juvenile fish require. Without the fish many of the water birds would disappear. Also the water companies that draw water from the lake would have to invest millions to keep their pumps clean and the costs would be passed on to the consumers. He said boaters would have to constantly flush out their motors to prevent the mussels from clogging up the water intake and the beaches would covered with the dead mussels, which would cause a foul odor.
