From there, Rezachek ventured into the landscaping industry. To help prevent the spread, the National Parks Service suggests boaters drain boats, motors and livewells (circulating tank) before leaving an area of water, wash boats and trailers, and let them dry for at least five days before taking the boat out again because zebra mussels, dependent on water currents and transportation, can infest boat motors and livewells.The first business he founded was an industrial hemp brokerage in Plymouth. “We can get those back and eliminate the mussels there, but then we have to stop them from getting there.” “The smaller lakes that maybe only have a few thousand mussels in them, they're not lost,” Rezachek said. While AntiMussel will focus on the Great Lakes, it also hopes to conduct customer surveys to see if landowners across the state need zebra mussel clean-ups on private beaches or in lakes. Heavily infested water bodies like Lake Michigan are beyond the point for a complete elimination of zebra mussels, but there is still hope for smaller lakes. So, unless we remove those in mass, we can never make beaches reusable for people again.” “And they're just going to keep collecting there, and the waves just keep pushing them on the beaches. “We can't walk on a lot of beaches on Lake Michigan now because they're covered in mussel shells, and they're razor sharp and they'll cut your feet and your dog's feet,” Rezachek said. “They just push them away.”Ī young woman checks over her cell phone while getting some beach time in at Deland Park, Saturday, July 9, 2022, in Sheboygan, Wis. “None of those solutions stop mussels from reproducing or remove the resulting shell,” he said. Rezachek said only 3% of the costs is dedicated to preventing further spread.Īccording to Rezachek, efforts to get rid of zebra mussels center on taking them off infrastructure, like applying chemicals or pressure washing, rather than completely removing them from the water. Zebra mussels can also overwhelm commercial, agricultural, forestry and aquaculture industries in the state, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.Īccording to some estimates, broad removal and resulting increases in water bills can cost taxpayers up to $1.5 billion a year. Today, an estimated 300 to 750 trillion zebra mussels are in the Great Lakes. “At this point, they're so well established that I could have boats out there sucking zebra mussels all day every day and probably never put a dent in the population,” he said. Not much can be done to remove them once a large population has invaded a lake or river. They negatively impact ecosystems in several ways, like outcompeting and incapacitating native mussel and other aquatic species.Īdditionally, a female zebra mussel can release up to 1 million eggs per year once reaching reproductive age of two, according to the National Parks Service. Since then, they’ve completely invaded the region and have riddled waterways feeding into the Mississippi River and western states Texas and California, according to the U.S. Zebra mussels were likely brought to the Great Lakes from Europe and Asia via ship ballast water in the 1980s.
#Zebra mussels in lake michigan how to
“I was really kind of an entrepreneur in search of a problem,” Rezachek said about starting AntiMussel. “And zebra mussels (have) been something that I've heard about my whole life but never heard anything else about other than how to stop them from spreading.” Participating in the pitch competitions helped Rezachek connect with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors, who will take him along on a research boat this spring to study zebra mussels, too. Subscriber exclusive: It's mid-January and the Great Lakes are virtually ice-free. “I want to skip that 6 to 8 million years of geology that it takes to make limestone and instead remove the mussels from the lake where we don't want them, process them, and we end up with a ground calcium carbonate material that is exactly what is being sold on the market now,” Tyler Rezachek, AntiMussel founder and U.S. A search for a man who was last seen near a break wall on Lake Michigan will continue today, according to the Sheboygan Fire Department A view of the Sheboygan lighthouse as seen, Tuesday, May 31, 2022, in Sheboygan, Wis.
0 kommentar(er)
