Giant invasive mussels eradicated from US ponds

FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP, N.J. >> Most Americans know mussels as thumb-sized shellfish that occasionally adorn restaurant dinner plates.

But a colony of mussels as big as the dinner plates themselves has recently been wiped out from a New Jersey pond, where they had threatened to spread to the nearby Delaware River and wreak ecological havoc, as they already are doing in other parts of the world.

Federal wildlife officials and a New Jersey conservation group say they’re confident they have narrowly avoided a serious environmental problem by eradicating Chinese pond mussels from a former fish farm in Hunterdon

County.

The mussels, in larvae form, hitched a ride to this country inside the gills of Asian carp that were imported for the Huey Property in Franklin Township and quickly began reproducing. Unlike the little mussels many Americans know, these ones can approach the size of footballs.

Their size and appetite enable them to out-compete native species for food and space. In many spots in Europe, the Chinese mussels have taken over waterways and pushed out not only native shellfish species, but also have altered river bottom conditions, harming or chasing away some species of fish.

“They can become a huge ecological nightmare,” said Emile DeVito, manager of science for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation. His group bought the land from private owners in 2007 and preserved it as open space.

Three years later, the presence of the Chinese mussels was discovered, causing great alarm. The nine deep ponds are at the headwaters of the Wickecheoke Creek, which flows into the Delaware River.