Michigan mussels disappear within a child’s lifetime

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At age 8 Tabitha Sutterfield, left, and her 7-year-old brother, Alex, tracked native mussels on the bottom of Michigan’s Houghton Lake. Now 15, she scrapes invasive zebra mussels from the native’s shells to save them from a threat that has decimated them in her lifetime. Image: Teresa Sutterfield

By Leslie Mertz

An entire group of native organisms is dying off in the lakes and rivers of the Great Lakes region, and  children are noticing.

They are native freshwater mussels, those interesting and long-lived “clams” that lie partly buried in the water bottom.

“It’s kind of sad. They’re part of the lake, part of my life,” said 15-year old Tabitha Sutterfield of Dansville, Mich. As a little girl, she spent many an hour on family vacations following the mussels’ meandering trails through the sand in Houghton Lake, Michigan’s largest inland lake, and then scooping up the native mussels.

“They had an odd shape to them and they were really pretty-looking,” she said. “It was weird thinking that they were alive, and they didn’t have eyes or a mouth.”

Today, native mussels are nearly gone from that lake, and from many other lakes and rivers throughout the region. They are victims of the army of zebra and quagga mussels that have infested waterways throughout the Great Lakes region. Native to eastern Europe, these often fingernail-sized intruders attach to hard surfaces, including native mussels, and do so in such numbers that they can prevent the native mussels from opening. If they can’t open, they can’t feed, breathe or breed.

“When I was younger, they were pretty easy to find,” Sutterfield said. That changed about seven or eight years ago, when she  noticed scores of empty native mussel shells washing up onto shore. At the same time she began wearing water shoes to keep from cutting her feet on the sharp-edged zebra mussels that were accumulating on native-mussel shells, and on driftwood, pebbles, and even on each other.

Pete Badra, an aquatic biologist with the Michigan Natural Features Inventory, gathers native mussels for a survey of the Black River in the Port Huron State Game Area.
Image: Sarah Coury.

The shallow water and other characteristics that make Houghton Lake such a good habitat for native mussels unfortunately ­also make it well-suited to zebra mussels, said mussel researcher David Zanatta, assistant professor at Central Michigan University’s Institute for Great Lakes Research. “In addition, Houghton Lake drains into the Muskegon River, and the Muskegon is filled with zebra mussels, too.”

Native mussels are indeed nearly gone from the Muskegon, said Peter Badra, aquatic biologist with the Michigan Natural Features Inventory, a program to locate, identify and document threatened and endangered species and communities throughout Michigan.

Other waterways, such as the Au Sable, Manistee and Detroit rivers, are similarly seeing huge declines.

“The Detroit River used to be one of the best, most diverse systems in Michigan for native mussels in terms of number of species,” he said. “We don’t see any live native mussels in the Detroit River anymore. We haven’t seen any in our surveys.”

Likewise, native-mussel populations in Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair and Lake Ontario are far less dense today than they were just a couple of decades ago, Zanatta said. “Lake Erie probably had on the range of at least two native mussels per square meter of the lake bottom before zebra mussels came in. Compare that to now, there’s (almost) none.”

In Zanatta’s surveys of coastal areas of the three lakes ­— the only areas where native mussels remain ­— the density of native mussels is 0.01 per square meter. “When something is decimated, it’s reduced by a factor of 10. This is decimated, and then decimated again,” he said. “It’s really bad.”

Despite the drastic declines in so many waterways, all is not lost. Pockets of native mussels persist here and there, especially in rivers, Badra said, and some rivers  remain mostly zebra-free. That’s due in large part to the different life cycles of the mussels. Zebra mussels release their microscopic larvae into the water, and the larvae float on currents until they make contact with a hard surface where they can attach. Native mussel larvae instead temporarily latch onto the gills of fish until they drop off and start their lives on the lake bottom.

Native mussels are disappearing from Michigan waters, primarily as a result of the invasion of zebra and quagga mussels. Dozens of zebra mussels are stacked on this native mussel, called a fatmucket (Lampsilis siliquoidea). They can seal the fatmucket shut, killing it. Image: Kurt Stepnitz.

“That means the native mussels get transported upstream when they’re attached to their fish host,” he said, so they can spread throughout a river. Conversely, he said, “The zebra mussels have a hard time persisting in flowing-water environments, because they always get washed downstream.”

Zebras have, however, spread in many rivers. “The problem is that we put in our boats in different lakes and impoundments, so we inadvertently keep transporting the zebra mussels to different spots upstream,” Badra said. “The Muskegon, Manistee and Au Sable get a lot of boat traffic, and there are really a lot of zebra mussels there because they are constantly transported upstream and reestablished.”

Boat traffic is also a major issue in the lakes, Zanatta said. “The Great Lakes are completely infested with zebra and quagga mussels, so if you boat in the Great Lakes and then go to an inland lake (without thoroughly cleaning the boat), you are transporting them.” Still, he said, some remote lakes remain free of zebra mussels and have thriving native-mussel populations, and others still cling to small, remnant native mussel populations despite the zebra invasion.   “The fact that they are still surviving is promising,” he said.

Back at Houghton Lake, Tabitha Sutterfield plans to continue scraping zebra mussels from every live native mussel she finds within 50 feet of the dock. She, her grandfather and her aunt have been doing that for several years now, and have seen a difference. While they cannot find a single living native mussel just a short walk to the east or west in the lake, they can quickly spot three to four dozen living native mussels still making their trails in the sand around the dock.

“I feel really of proud of myself,” she said. After all, she added, “I’ve known them since forever. They’ve always been in the lake.”

10 thoughts on “Michigan mussels disappear within a child’s lifetime

  1. I don’t know anything about clams, that said my husband and sons have been fishing every day for weeks in Berrien Springs Michigan and all they are getting is clams I don’t know what kind but here there’s plenty

  2. I think the clams in our lake started to disappear long before the zebra mussels appeared about 4 years ago. We are a private lake of 80 acres and had loads of clams BEFORE they stated putting chemicals into the lake to fight the milfoil which we have had since we moved onto the lake in 1972. The chemical spraying started around 2003. Since, our clams have died off and you can’t find but a handful. Our lake has so much more foul smelling silt or what us old timers call sludge. All because the new comers on the lake want a weed free play area which began as a marrow pit. You can’t change the ecology of a lake, put high powered inboards that stir up the bottom and never let the lake reclaim itself every couple of years like it did since it began. We are killing our lakes and streams by being selfish and disrespectful to our waterways. The habitat for so many species has been tampered with and our grandchildren may never see the beauty of what once was.

  3. Many studies show Perch are prime predators of zebra mussels, and do quite well even increase around them. Case in point in Huron Perch Walleye other native fish are rebounding very well, in the middle of the mussels. The only change has been alewives are gone. The DNR called it native strike back syndrome. Tho I can’t find any studies on much reversal there is. They just cry about the alewife/salmon thing.
    Chinook only eat alewives, thus all other invasives safe. Google biotic resistance invasive species, tons of stuff.
    Lack of predators or lacking enough allowed alewives etc… to thrive, overfishing mostly. We have several native predators for invasives, they just need some help surviving the spawn.

  4. Yes Jim, I saw that, some others. Poison or barriers only put the control in one spot, very costly. Predator levels make the entire waterbody/system a control. Since entire systems are infected, anything we do must affect the entire system. Would you poison all of Lake Michigan? Invasives affect the entire system, we reverse that.

  5. Successful trials (some on open water) to control invasive mussels with bacteria lethal only to zebras and quaggas have been conducted in New York, California, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois.

  6. We have native predators for the mussels, studies have proven mussels can be controlled if predators abundant. But they also eat alewives,too many predators not allowed, so we get to watch more native species go extinct. Our common goal is supposed to be to protect the natural resources, But we are only allowed to work together to save the alewives. Don’t blame the mussels they have no choice, the DNR does.

  7. Well said Harold, we are making a mess of this planet. My hope is that when we humans face extinction of our own making, there are a few other species that survive besides rats and roaches.

  8. Sadly, during anyone’s lifetime, the natural world will be greatly decimated. We are making a mess of this planet. During my parents’ short lifetimes, the world’s human population increased from 2 billion to over 7 billion(!!)–which has been the cause of widespread habitat loss resulting in a rate of species extinction unparalled since the days of dinosaurs. So many more species are now at risk. And invasive species pose an additional threat, due to our penchant for unregulated trade and our desire to exploit cheap labor in other countries. Our debt crisis pales in comparison to our nature deficit.

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