Zebra Mussel Sightings in Wisconsin

From May 10, 1990 (update #1)

SUPERIOR - In late April 1990, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources biologist Dennis Pratt found 18 zebra mussels on eight of 20 buoys from the Superior-Duluth harbor shipping channel. This was the first confirmed sighting of zebra mussels in Lake Superior. (An unconfirmed sighting at Thunder Bay, Ont., was reported earlier this year.)

MILWAUKEE - In early April 1990, a routine inspection of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research vessel Roger Simons, overwintering in Milwaukee harbor, found zebra mussels in the ship's water intakes. This vessel had spent time in Lake Erie during 1989, and it had already traversed Lake Erie and several other Great Lakes by early May 1990.

STURGEON BAY - The first confirmed sighting of zebra mussels in Wisconsin occurred at Bay Shipbuilding here in late summer 1989, when zebra mussels were found on a barge belonging to a Michigan-based company that had been in service on Lake Erie. Zebra mussels were also discovered at the same location a short time later on the U.S. Coast Guard Lake Erie icebreaker Neah Bay from Cleveland. (An earlier report of zebra mussels on a buoy in Green Bay could not be confirmed.).

ID: 19900510-3.

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.