Welcome to the interactive web schedule for the 2019 Midwest Fish & Wildlife Conference! Please note, this event has passed. To return to the main Conference website, go to: www.midwestfw.org.
For tips on navigating this schedule, click HELPFUL INFO below.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE UPDATES & CHANGES: As a result of the prolonged government shutdown, we experienced a number of cancellations and changes to the schedule. Cancellations and changes are listed here (as of January 26, 2019).
ABSTRACT: Dreissena mussels pose a significant challenge to infrastructures. One key element contributing to this challenge is the lack of a practical method for large-scale control of populations once they become established throughout a water body. As a result, facilities drawing water from such water bodies are subjected to constant reinfestation. Although concerns exist about environmental impacts of molluscicides, it is the prohibitive total project cost of open-water control programs that currently eliminates them as a mitigation option. Total project cost includes not only the molluscicide and its application throughout the entire water body, but also a myriad of other expenses often required in the overall control program, such as fund raising, administration, regulatory approval, post-treatment mussel mortality monitoring, report writing, etc. The research project reported herein offers a potential solution to this seemingly intractable problem of prohibitively high control program expense. The key to the low cost of this proposed control approach is that it does not require treatment of the entire water body. In contrast to traditional control programs: 1) only a minuscule portion of the infested water body’s volume would be treated (“seeded”) with the control agent; and 2) the control agent would subsequently amplify itself and self-spread throughout the water body. There is only one type of control agent capable of doing that – a live one, a biological control agent. This presentation describes the research conducted in the first year of a multi-year project to find such a control agent. The project is based in Eurasia and specifically designed to find a hypervirulent (i.e., extremely lethal), highly-specific dreissenid parasite that one day (following years of comprehensive environmental safety studies) would be introduced into North American water bodies where it will leave a trail of dead dreissenids in the path of its spread.