They might have found a way to fight zebra and quagga mussels...:)

[wakina]

I personally think that they have helped the lake . If you are in your 60' you can remember what Lake Erie was like when you were a kid . I am not forgetting the big part the federal Goverment played . But zebra muscles work for nothing .

They are one of the worst things to happen to Lake Erie because they also filter out and consume the very food that feeds almost all species of fish just after hatching, and that includes our beloved walleyes. When fish are first hatched they are to small and weak to swim so they are very limited in their ability to seek more fertile feeding ground, basically they just sit on the bottom and feed on zooplankton that the currents bring to them. This is the most critical stage in the recruitment process. In essence they can barely move until they grow some. The zebra mussels feed on the same zooplankton at the same time, so there may not be enough food to support 40 million just hatched walleyes.

In the 50s the lake was every bit as clean as it is today, what dirtied the lake was all of the sewage, waste water and phosphorus from detergent and fertilizer that was pouring into the lake from almost every major river, Creeks and stream. That turned Lake Erie into one gigantic cesspool in the early 60s and along with it the decline of the walleye population.

The algae blooms of today are bad but nothing like those in the early to mid 60s. You would actually have to wipe your fish line as you retrieved it to keep from having one sticky stinking mess in and on your reel as well as yourself. It would be a floating mass of dead and dying algae sometimes a couple of inches thick! Most of the public beaches would either be shutdown or at least have warning signs that the water was not safe to swim in due to e coli bacteria as well as the putrid decaying algae

I will also add that I have been fishing Erie since 1955 starting as a 7 year old boy fishing the lake with my father.