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But he said it’s also possible the mussels won’t do very well in the Ottawa.

And he said lakes in Gatineau Park and farther north in Quebec are under threat if people bring boats there without washing them. Baby zebra mussels are too small to see and can spread in tiny amounts of water transported in a boat.

“Humans are a problem. We are a mobile species,” he said, and boat-washing will be a key preventive measure.

The mussels may also force Ottawa and Gatineau to clean out their water intakes in years to come, because mussels love flowing water and can coat the inside of water pipes until they choke off the flow.

“It’s a nuisance to biodiversity. It kills the native species. It can even amplify the problem of blue-green algae and the closing of beaches” by filtering “good” algae and leaving the toxic ones behind, he said.

There’s still no way to tell how many mussels can live in the Ottawa River, Martel said.

“I’m hoping it (Lac Deschênes) will change very little. My concern is mainly upstream. I would hate to see Lac des Allumettes and Lac Coulonge change and lose their wild nature.”

Zebra mussels get their name from their striped shells. They attach to hard surfaces such as rocks, boats, pipes and the walls of the Rideau Canal.

They arrived in the Great Lakes in the 1980s in the ballast water of freighters from Europe, where they are native. The mussels have almost no natural enemies here. In parts of the Rideau system they coat all the rocks in shallow water, making a surface too sharp for swimmers to walk on in bare feet.

tspears@ottawacitizen.com

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