ANuS Inspections

[risingsun]

1,000 to 1 it was birds.

I had said that for years, but read that the so-called experts said it wasn't possible.

 

[Sum1]

They need to stock gobies

 

[Vollmer]

They need to stock gobies

Wasn’t that an additional reason Erie took off, the introduction? Boom? Of gobies?

 

[Kurtr]

Wasn’t that an additional reason Erie took off, the introduction? Boom? Of gobies?

It was the zebra muscles that cleaned water that was a pool of pollutants. The gobies were to try and eat the muscles

 

[Allen]

I had said that for years, but read that the so-called experts said it wasn't possible.

Whoever wrote that article is an idiot. This has been in the ANS literature for many years.

 

[shorthairsrus]

I dont think you can compare to lake Erie -- run off alone is more fertile -- Erie itself starts out more fertile. greater chances wake boat > bird

 

[Kurtr]

Lake Erie was a sewage dump for 100 years also.

By the late 1960s, Lake Erie was widely considered "biologically dead" due to decades of heavy industrial pollution, untreated municipal sewage, and agricultural runoff

 

[ale]

To be fair I don’t think you can attribute Erie’s turnout to zeebs alone. Lots of things changed. Major cities dumped all their raw sewage, factories dumped untreated waste etc. It’s also big enough that mussels probably can’t filter out all the plankton and starve minnows like they could in smaller lakes. There’s a book called the life and death of the Great Lakes that is a cool read.

 

[thriller1]

1,000 to 1 it was birds.

dig a hole in a field and fill it with water...in 3 months it will have minnows, perch, stickelbacks, etc swiming in it, all which hitched rides in on bird feathers. them tiny mussel larvae stick in the feathers of waterfowl and cormorants and spread like wildfire

I agree 100% I shot a mallard in a cornfield one time and when I went to pick it up, it was literally crawling with freshwater shrimp.

 

[MSA]

I agree 100% I shot a mallard in a cornfield one time and when I went to pick it up, it was literally crawling with freshwater shrimp.

yup, and those tiny sticky eggs from perch, minnows, sticklebacks, and other shallow water spawning fish stick in their feathers as they swim thru the moss & weeds. No reason to think zebra mussel larva wouldnt hitch a ride. every single slough, pothole, livestock watering pond, and gravel pit out there has all those fish and more in them, and its not from game & fish stocking.

It'd be interesting to shoot a few ducks & geese and dunk them in an aquarium full of clean water just to see whats hitching rides. I've looked al over the internet for a similar experiment but can't find anything...surely I'm not the only one thats thought of doing this.

There was an experiment they did, in europe I think, where they fed ducks fertile fish eggs, and a small percentage of the eggs got pooped out undamaged with wiggling embryos in them, but I still say sticking to feathers is the primary way of transport.

I did find one study where they found .2 zebra mussel veligers per duck. seems insignifigant, but I bet with different bird species that have different swimming habits in different water bodies at different times of the year, that number can be significantly higher.