Most Lake County residents have never seen a quagga mussel and likely never will. There hasn’t been a quagga mussel found in Clear Lake or any other lake in the county, at least not yet. They have been found in many Southern California lakes.
There is a reason for this. Lake County has one of the best quagga prevention programs in the state and it is getting better. Despite hundreds of boats from all over the country visiting the lake each week, the mussels have been kept out of Clear Lake and other lakes in the county.
The county started its mussel prevention program in 2008 and at that time just about everyone predicted quagga mussels would be in Clear Lake within a few years. The program has been highly successful because of several monitoring locations around the lake, which are checked monthly for the mussels.
Quagga mussels are not a native species to California or even the United States. The mussels are native to the Dneiper River of the Ukraine, which is near Russia. The quagga mussel got its name after an extinct species of African zebra. It has an average life span of three to five years and is a filter feeder. It pulls water into its shell cavity where plankton is removed. Each adult mussel is capable of filtering one or more quarts of water a day.
The quagga mussel is a prolific breeder and each female is capable of producing up to a million eggs per year. The larva are called veligers. In their native land they have natural predators, including ducks and various species of fish. In America there are no predators although scientists have recently discovered that yellow perch and redear sunfish will eat them.
The quagga mussel was first discovered in the United States in Lake Erie back in 1989. It is believed the mussels got into Lake Erie in the ballast tanks of an ore ship from Europe. The ships fill their ballast tanks with water when the ship is empty to stabilize it. By law all ships are required to empty their ballast tanks 2 miles out to sea before entering U.S. waters. Apparently one ship failed to do so and when it emptied its tanks in Lake Erie it released some quagga mussels.
Quagga mussels were discovered in Lake Mead in Nevada back in 2007. The mussels then spread to other lakes in Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Southern California. Scientists say the mussels were more than likely spread to the other lakes by boaters. A quagga mussel can live from three to five years.
Once the mussels get established in a lake there is no way to eradicate them. In fact, not a single large body of water that has been contaminated with mussels has had the mussels successfully eradicated.
Officials are concerned that boats from out of the area will carry the veligers to Clear Lake and that is the reason the county requires that all boats from out of the county be issued a new quagga mussel sticker monthly. Residents of the county are required to get a sticker annually.
Before a sticker is issued, the boater must fill out a form stating where the boat was last put into the water. If the boat is coming from an infected water it must first be decontaminated by county personnel. If a boater is stopped on the water by a member of the sheriff’s boat patrol and the boat doesn’t have a current sticker, the operator can be issued a ticket and fined. The county also has monitors stationed at public ramps to ensure that all boats are displaying a valid sticker before they can launch. The ramp monitors do more than just inspect boats. They serve as a representative of the county and assist the boaters. To assist the ramp monitors there are trained dogs that can locate the mussel on any boat. It is just another tool in combating the mussel.
No one wants Clear Lake to be infected with quagga mussels. Clear Lake is one of the oldest lakes in the world and we want to protect it from invasive species of mussels and plants.
