![]() “A Ponar is a blind pinprick,” Elgin said. The cameras help them see if the grabs they take are good representations of the area. Researchers do three grabs at each sampling location to make sure their readings are accurate. A single mussel can’t filter much water, but together they make a much larger impact. ![]() They affect the environment by filtering water to eat phytoplankton, microscopic plants that make prime food for the base of the food web. Quagga mussels arrived in the Great Lakes in ships’ ballast water. Getting visual data on the mussels is helpful in figuring out where they pose the greatest risk. Getting a sense of scale is also difficult, Elgin said.īut the benefits outweigh the challenges, according to Ron Muzzi, another member of the lab operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Murky water, bad weather and blocked camera lenses make visibility difficult. There’s no way to re-shoot the video once the dredge is done. ![]() Scientists started using GoPros on their equipment in 2015. They’ve largely displaced another invasive species, the zebra mussel. ![]() The numbers peaked and then declined, but are still relatively high, Elgin said. They gradually spread to all five Great Lakes and by 2010 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor found that Lake Michigan’s mussel population was 99.99 percent quagga mussels, with as many as 450 trillion quagga mussels. They first turned up in the Great Lakes in 1989 near Port Colbourne, Ontario, along Lake Erie. ![]()
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