ALIEN CREATURES: Oregon steps up efforts to keep invasive species out of waters

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Lanoie Wieland was headed to Blue Lake in Portland on Thursday, driving north on Interstate 5, when he saw the “boat inspection” sign posted just south of the rest stop near the Santiam River. Wieland pulled his rig — a truck and a trailer with a small, flat-bottomed boat on the roof — up to the temporary inspection station set up by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The North Dakota resident said he was happy to comply with the inspection and not remotely surprised by it.

All across the West, the hunt is on for aquatic invasive species stowing away on boats, fishing gear and even on anglers’ boots, leap­frogging from lake to lake, where they multiply like crazy, smothering the native species and clogging everything from power plant pipes to irrigation ditches.

Small mussels — zebra and quagga mussels that measure less than 2 inches long — present the biggest threat, state fish and wildlife officials say. Even though they haven’t been found in any Oregon waterways yet, out-of-state boats encrusted with them occasionally have been spotted on state highways, said Rick Boatner, a Fish and Wildlife biologist heading the agency’s battle against aquatic invasive species.

Before the state developed its boat decontamination stations, Oregon State Police occasionally were called upon to escort out-of-state boaters to the border to make sure they didn’t launch their mussel-­encrusted vessels here, Boatner said.

With the passage of a new law and a new boating fee, Oregon now has five inspection teams who work at boat docks across the state, prepared to help decontaminate boats carrying unwanted hitchhikers.

The inspection teams also are setting up impromptu inspection areas at rest stops along the interstate in an effort to educate boaters about the problem and about new fees that must be paid by boat owners with craft 10 feet or longer.

In contrast to many elements of state government that are stagnant or in retreat in the face of Oregon’s budget crisis, the state’s war against invasive waterborne species is accelerating. The money is coming from the new annual fee that virtually all recreational boaters must pay — and that some are resisting paying.

Nor is the inspection effort guaranteed to succeed. It’s entirely up to boat owners whether to let inspectors examine their watercraft, be it at a highway rest stop or a lake or river put-in. The new law doesn’t give inspectors the right to search for the invasives against a boat owner’s objections.

On Thursday, the inspection team estimated that about 30 percent of drivers hauling boats were pulling into the rest area to comply with the inspections. The rest were giving the inspection area a wide berth.

“It has to be done”

Wieland works for SolarBee, a company whose solar-powered pumps sit in lakes and reservoirs all across the country. His job is periodic maintenance on the pump systems, making him and his boat a potential vector for the spread of invasive species. To keep that from happening, Wieland said, he scrubs down his boat — and his boots — each time he hauls out of the water. His boat got a clean bill of health from Oregon officials on Thursday.

“It’s necessary,” he said of the inspections and of the cleaning regimen his company requires. “It has to be done.”

Zebra and quagga mussels have been the bane of Eastern waters since arriving in the Great Lakes in the 1980s in the ballast water of transoceanic ships. They quickly reproduced and spread and have become notorious for clogging water-intake systems at power plants, irrigation districts and public water supplies.

Prodigious consumers of phytoplankton, they alter not only the food web, but water clarity, which can affect what thrives and what doesn’t. They have been moving steadily west and have so infested Lake Mead on the Nevada-­Arizona border since being discovered there in 2007 that the lake has become a training ground for wildlife officials looking to learn as much as they can about them and how to control them.

More: http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/25033484-57/lake-invasive-state-boat-river.csp