Can You Top This?

?

From September, 1996 (Update #28)

Veligers were found at a density of nearly 1.6 million per cubic meter in a sample taken from a water intake on the Mississippi River near Muscatine, Iowa, according to Tom Ferro of AquaTech Environmental, Buffalo, N.Y. The sample was collected on June 4 when the water temperature was 65 F. Two weeks earlier, veligers had been found at an estimated density of 654,000 per cubic meter. By mid-June, densities had significantly declined. These were the highest veliger densities Ferro said he's seen in seven years of monitoring zebra mussels. Most of the veligers in early June were D- shaped, he added, indicating that they were recently spawned. While a veliger density of 1.5 million per cubic meter is admittedly large, Indiana University-Kokomo biologist Dave Garton pointed out that veliger densities of 500,000 per cubic meter in western Lake Erie are not uncommon.

ID: 199609-13.

The Zebra Mussel Update was a 4- to 8-page quarterly national newsletter published by the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute from May 1990 through May 1997. The ZMU documented the spread of the zebra mussel -- an exotic nuisance mussel -- through North America's freshwater environments, especially the Great Lakes, and on efforts to control it.