What are the potential impacts if quagga and zebra mussels become introduced into Wyoming?
If you use water or electricity, you do not want invasive mussels introduced into your state’s waters. These species can have widespread impacts on power plants, municipalities, irrigation systems and other water users. They impede water delivery and increase maintenance costs by clogging pipes, pumps, turbines and filtration systems-costs that are all passed on to the consumer.Fisheries are destroyed by by the presence of these invasive filter-feeding mussels. Quagga and zebra mussels remove plankton from the water. Plankton are the primary food source for forage fish and forage fish are the food of sport fishes. For example, the lake trout population in Lake Ontario has declined by 95 percent in the last 10 years due to a crash in the food chain caused by invasive mussels.
