This prevents the chemical from settling into the sediment for burial, which is what used to happen before the mussel takeover. In the process, they are constantly ingesting and pooping out phosphorus. Here's HowĪ quagga mussel 600 feet under the surface can filter that entire water column above it in a few hours, Katsev said. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. The muddy bottoms of the Great Lakes are now thick with them: Dive down and you can often find 1,000 per square foot. But over the following decades quagga mussels found their foothold and outcompeted their zebra-striped cousins. At first zebra mussels dominated the headlines, as they choked water-pipes and piled up on shorelines. In the 1980s, quagga and zebra mussels rode in the ballasts of ships from Russia’s Volga River, across the Atlantic Ocean and up the Saint Lawrence seaway to the Great Lakes. A new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, helps explain why the blooms persist: Hordes of invasive quagga mussels have effectively reengineered the largest freshwater ecosystem on Earth. Since the 1970s, farmers and cities have been cutting phosphorus pollution - in the form of fertilizer washing off fields and sewage - but algal blooms keep killing fish and grossing out tourists. The muck suffocates fish and contaminates drinking water, posing a threat to the 1.3 million jobs that depend on proximity to Great Lakes shipping routes and beauty. The Great Lakes are threatened by toxic, greenhouse-gas-emitting algae that thrive on phosphorus pollution.
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