What Zebra Mussels Did to Lake Michigan's Water Clarity Wasn't a Good Thing

Zebra mussels arrived in the Great Lakes in the late 1980s, almost certainly in ballast water discharged from transatlantic shipping. Within a few years they had colonized hard surfaces across multiple lakes. The water got visibly clearer. That clarity turned out to be a warning sign. This investigation explains what filter-feeding at that scale does to a lake: the plankton removal that starved the base of the food web, the nutrient redirection that fed bottom algae instead of open-water fish, the intake pipes and infrastructure clogged across the region, and the quagga mussel that followed and went deeper than zebra mussels could. 📍 In this investigation: Why clearer water meant a collapsing food web What happened to the alewife and the salmon fishery The nutrient shift that fed the wrong organisms How the quagga mussel outcompeted its own predecessor What ballast water rules changed, and what they came too late for 📚 Sources: NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, USGS Nonindigenous Aquatic Species database. #GreatLakes #ZebraMussels #InvasiveSpecies