Quagga Mussels In Lake Mead Highly Effective Bioconcentrators Of Toxins, Heavy Metals - L.V. Sun

[hatrack]

Anyone who doubts that the quagga mussels in Lake Mead are a critical issue should consider this warning from the experts: If the quaggas are not stopped, they could poison the lake. Years before they showed up in Southern Nevada, the little mollusks colonized the Great Lakes, and researchers there have found that the rise in their quagga populations correlates with increases in dangerous toxins. There are two reasons for this: poop and algae. Quaggas can poop poison pellets and can turn swaths of open lake into algae-filled dead zones.

The scoop on the poop is this: Each mussel works like a tiny liver, absorbing toxins and heavy metals such as mercury, selenium, polychlorinated biphenyls (known as PCBs), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (or PAHs) from the lake water in a process called bioaccumulation.

But quaggas are not content to do a good deed. They later expel those chemicals and metals — in the form of a highly concentrated pellet. Those toxic pellets sink to the lake floor.

Some of the pellets are eaten by bottom feeders. As the bottom feeders eat more and more of the pellets, the toxins concentrate in their tissues. When a whole bunch of those bottom feeders are eaten by larger fish or birds, higher concentrations of those toxins build up in those predators, in a process called biomagnification. The toxins amplify in each predator as they make their way up the food chain — all the way to fishermen and bird hunters.

EDIT

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/nov/09/quagga-quagmire/

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. The quaggas aren’t poisoning the lake! We poisoned it!

They’re cleaning it from the lake water! That’s bivalves’ job!

[Nihil]

7. That's an important clarification there.

> The quaggas aren’t poisoning the lake! We poisoned it!
> They’re cleaning it from the lake water! That’s bivalves’ job!

Mind you, given the rate of growth of the invasive bivalves, no doubt
there will soon be a "US jobs for US bivalves!" protest going soon ...
"Those damn forrin buyvalves, coming over here and filtering our water ..."

:hide:

[phantom power]

2. von Neumann filters

[XemaSab]

3. Why not start Quagga farms

where their waste can be collected and trucked off to an appropriate storage facility? :shrug:

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. The article goes on to say they contribute to a build-up of cyanobacteria by eating other algae

But, yeah, using bivalves to clean bodies of water just makes sense. That’s what they do.

[NNadir]

5. You mean sort of like a Yucca Mountain for dangerous fossil fuel and electronic waste?

Don't be ridiculous!?!

We all know that the dangerous fossil fuel industry and the electronics industry, including the ridiculous solar industry are not required to contain their wastes for eternity in such conditions that they don't injure anyone ever anywhere at anytime even after the sun becomes a red giant.

That type of requirement is limited to one and only one industry in the minds of a very stupid public which is always making crazy assed assumptions about how Lake Mead is highly radioactive.

Those PAH's and mercury are largely associated with burning coal - although the PAH's are also associated with the dangerous car CULTure as well. Probably the dangerous coal waste in Lake Mead originates in places like Kayenta and the other Navajo coal plants, where the health of Navajo coal miners and dangerous coal waste aerosols has produced zero concern trolls obsessed with the lung x-rays of Navajo coal miners and coal ash breathers from the 1950's or little bathos festivals from ignoramuses with names like Buffy and Hammy.

Those PCB's of course, are from stuff like transformers and capacitors, but not to worry, because our dangerous electronic industry is replacing them with swell things like sulfur hexafluoride and of course, swell fire proof PBDE's and PBDB's.

All these wastes in Lake Mead are um, "green" because no one gives a rat's ass about them.

I'm very happy about the selenium though. Prehaps the mussels could be little tiny selenium ores that we could mine to produce all of our swell cadmium selenide solar cells.

[XemaSab]

6. Exactly

:P