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University of Windsor
Biologist studies golden mussel in South America
Understanding the spread of the golden mussel in a South American river system will help Hugh MacIsaac in his efforts to keep yet another invasive species from attacking the Great Lakes.~
“It’s imperative that we keep this species out, because there’s no question it could survive in the Great Lakes,” said Dr. MacIsaac, a professor in the Great Lakes Institute of Environmental Research and the Department of Biological Sciences.
MacIsaac received a $120,000 Discovery Accelerator Supplement grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to study the colonization of the golden mussel. An invasive mollusk similar to the zebra mussel, the golden mussel was transported in the hulls of ocean freighters from Southeast Asia and entered the Paraná River in Argentina in 1991. Since then, it has spread into Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil. MacIsaac’s research team will study the mussel’s survival methods in order to understand strategies that permit invasive species to spread widely.
MacIsaac—director of the NSERC-funded Canadian Aquatic Invasive Species Network—received an additional $50,000 NSERC Northern Supplement grant on top of his $305,000 Discovery grant to study how invasive species spread on ship hulls to the Arctic, where warmer waters and increased ship travel are expected to increase the area’s vulnerability to invaders. Planned studies will help his team advise federal regulators and the shipping industry on how to minimize the risk of further Great Lakes invasions.
The golden mussel team, which includes two visiting PhD students from the University of Buenos Aires, will compare the genetic differences of mussels that thrive in both clear water and in turbid water to understand whether their reproduction and growth can be attributed to a single invasion, or more than one introduction.
“We’ll be able to discern that by looking at the genetic composition of each of these populations from two very different settings,” MacIsaac said. “We want to know how invasive species successfully establish in habitats that environmental suitability models suggest they shouldn’t be capable of colonizing.”
Determining how their numbers grow in unlikely settings will provide scientists with better data for regulators to establish policies to stem the spread of invasive species, he said. National shipping regulations for instance, now require ocean freighters to flush ballast tanks with salt water on the open seas to kill potential invaders before they enter Canadian waters, a rule MacIsaac said can be attributed to the work of Sarah Bailey, an adjunct professor who works in his lab and has conducted extensive research on the spread of zebra mussels.
Including supplemental grants, UWindsor researchers were awarded almost $3.2 million in Discovery grants from NSERC this year. Read more about UWindsor’s NSERC Discovery grant award winners.
Mussel-bound: Pablo Perepelizin, Francisco Sylvester, Hugh MacIsaac, and Estaban Paolucci examine samples of golden mussels.