By Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen, October 3, 2018
They came. They didn’t see much — mussels have no eyes. But they sure conquered.
Zebra mussels overran the Rideau River during the past three decades, and now a study from the Canadian Museum of Nature says they lucked into a place with a full buffet, perfect water and no enemies.
Then they reproduced like mad: la revanche du berceau all over again.
André Martel saw the first arrivals in our region in the fall of 1990. He had been a PhD student when the mussels invaded Lake Erie in the late 1980s, spilled from the ballast of a ship from the Black Sea area, where they are native.