Coming to a reservoir near you

[Norske]

Coming to a reservoir near you

The first reservoir on the Missouri is Canyon Ferry, near Townsend, MT. It's a trophy walleye lake due to their foraging on high-energy trout. Tiber Reservoir, also on the Missouri is another.
Google "invasive mussels, Canyon Ferry Lake" and pick the link to the Bozeman newspaper. Watch the time-lapse map in that link.​

 

[Vollmer]

 

[Vollmer]

[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Neill Goltz was riding a bicycle near the headwaters of the Missouri River last week when he stopped to watch two men pull a motor boat out of the water at a takeout along Trident Road.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Signs posted near the takeout warned against spreading a small non-native shellfish, known as zebra and quagga mussels, and instructed water users to clean, drain and dry their equipment.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Goltz, himself a fisherman, said the two men did no such thing. They loaded up and drove off. He’s watched the same mussels invade waters in Minnesota, and thinks there should have been spray equipment at the boat launch for the men to use.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]It might not matter. State officials detected mussel larvae 22 miles downriver, at the York’s Island Fishing Access Site near Townsend. The discovery has some in Montana concerned the state is on the brink of an ecological crisis with economic impacts.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]“Let’s say he went up to the tip of the reservoir and now he’s coming back and taking out where it’s clean of zebras or maybe it isn’t, but if he’s got water in his well, how long does it last, and is his next trip up Hyalite Canyon?” Goltz asked.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]The European mussels were first detected in the Great Lakes in the 1980s. They’ve spread west, and have finally reached Montana. A single mussel can produce millions of eggs. They’re nearly impossible to eradicate. And when they reproduce in mass they can damage water systems and power plants. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]On Wednesday, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock created a “rapid response team” staffed by the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, and the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks to address their reach into Montana.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]The order he signed responded to tests published on Nov. 8, which showed baby mussels, called veligers, present in the Tiber Reservoir north of Great Falls. More veligers have been detected since, but they’re still looking for colonies of striped adult mussels. The assumption is that it’s only a matter of time and testing.[/FONT]
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A graphic showing the spread of zebra mussels across the United States from 1986 to 2016.
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]“The rapid response team is expediting the processing of samples taken from water bodies this summer,” said FWP’s Greg Lemon. “We’re sending some samples to a lab in Colorado that’s going to help us. The expectation is to have all of our water samples taken from the routine monitoring done in the next two weeks.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]FWP took more than 500 water samples from all over the state this year. The sample from Hyalite Reservoir, a major source of water for Bozeman, taken on June 7 tested negative for mussel veligers. And Lemon said they’ll soon have results from the Missouri, Gallatin, Madison, Jefferson, and Yellowstone rivers, Ennis Lake, Three Forks ponds, and Clark Canyon Reservoir.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]They also imposed a ban on removing boats and docks from Tiber and Canyon Ferry until they’re iced over. And they’re conducting more detailed sampling on those waters, which could help determine the presence of adult mussels.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Trout Unlimited’s executive director, Bruce Farling, said he’s concerned and thinks this could be a major environmental issue for Montana’s trout.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]“I’m more concerned about this,” Farling said in comparison to whirling disease. “We’ve seen how sweeping the effects of these invasive mussels can be in other places.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Rivers and streams might be OK, but Farling said trout live in reservoirs and lakes, too.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Amy Benson is the U.S. Geological Survey’s fishery biologist who tracks the foreign mussel infestation. On Friday, she said that the mussel’s prefer reservoirs and lakes, and, “That might be Montana’s saving grace.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]“I’m hoping that the zebra or quagga mussels that are there won’t really find suitable habitat. They prefer slower-moving waters, reservoirs and big rivers with a lot of slack water, they can’t take a lot of scouring. They’re not doing well in the lower Colorado River.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]The mussel veligers are small and delicate and can’t attach to objects in running water, she said. Benson added that there might be something about the intermountain west’s reservoir’s at high altitude, maybe the chemistry, that the mussels don’t like. “They were found in half a dozen reservoirs in Colorado and none have been found since, that’s been five years ago and they’re monitoring for them.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]But no one thinks that Montana should wait and see. Gov. Steve Bullock’s budget for the next two years includes an annual $1.1 million budget for boat check stations.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]In 2015, $4 million in federal funding was included in the Water Resources Development Act to match state spending on boat inspections in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. But the states never got the money from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]State Rep. Mike Cuffe, R-Eureka, has been working with Montana’s congressional delegation to make amendments to ensure the money gets freed up and to add another $1 million for testing. If it passes, Cuffe said, there should be $9 million for distribution among Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]“It’s about time we treated this like a full-blown emergency,” Cuffe said Friday.[/FONT]
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[fnznfwl]

Further proof that nothing good comes from east of I-29

 

[LBrandt]

^^^^^^^^^ then I am good by about 15 miles.

 

[NodakBuckeye]

If somebody had demanded that the U.S. Coast Guard and the Canadien equivalent stop every inbound ship up the St Lawrence, Mississippi, etc,.. and either observe treatment of ballast water with something or exchange freshwater ballast with salt water to raise salinity, or something along those lines to kill in hitchhikers, this never would have happened.

 

[Traxion]

The best you can do is what WY is doing. First, require inspection of each and every vessel that crosses into the state. Provide decontamination units at each station. Second, put out a HUGE public information campaign to educate boaters in the state. Provide decontamination at popular lakes and mandatory ones at infested waters. Make the budget commitment and place some burden on boaters thru licensing, etc. And, make the penalties SEVERE.

It may be a foregone conclusion in some ways, but the fight has to be fought. We have to try to hold it off as long as possible. The costs for just water intakes cleaning is nuts when mussels show up. I hope they don't explode out of there but good luck. That reservoir feeds the big lakes we love. Sad deal.....

 

[ranger150]

Draining live-wells, pulling the plug will do little. Tourist department will not allow what needs to be done. Inspection of all out of state boats needs to be done in order to fish ND waters. A ND boat that leaves ND is another discussion.

 

[Norske]

In the Walleye Central heydays, the MN anglers who were too busy or too privileged to decontaminate their boats liked to blame waterfowl for the spread of zebra mussels. Then someone posted the map of mussel spread, and it followed MN highways. I couldn't resist firing the boys up by claiming the scientific name for the waterfowl that spread the mussels the most was Lundus rangerii. I got the reaction I wanted.

 

[eyexer]

they have a chemical now to kill them. it's very expensive. but in all honesty they really never turned out to be the end all that many predicted. Lake Erie is a classic example. The Zeb's cleaned the pollution out of the lake and the place exploded into a walley trophy factory. Sure there are some pain in the asses associated with them but it's not been the doom and gloom many predicted.