State assessing mussel contamination

The extent to which invasive mussels may have contaminated Montana’s waterways could come within the next few weeks, according to biologists and state officials working to understand and address the state’s first-ever confirmed detection of the destructive mollusks.

Matt Wolcott, who was tapped last week to head up a response team to address the issue, said emergency funding from the state is being used to accelerate processing of the hundreds of still-untested water samples. Along with additions to staffing at the Fish, Wildlife and Parks laboratory, the team has also ramped up the effort by outsourcing samples to a pair of labs in Colorado and at the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station in Yellow Bay.

“Winter is hampering our efforts to collect more data from the field, but we’re making good progress,” Wolcott said during a Thursday afternoon briefing. “We’re anticipating that the backlog of samples that still need to be processed, we’ll get through them by Dec. 19.”

Larvae from either quagga or zebra mussels were confirmed a month ago in samples taken from Tiber Reservoir. Additional “suspect” results indicated the larvae may also have been present in samples taken over the summer from Central Montana’s Canyon Ferry Reservoir, Missouri River and Milk River.

Both of the non-native mussel species pose the risk of substantial damage to the state’s aquatic ecosystems, economy and underwater infrastructure. Searches over the last month failed to turn up any adult mussels, but many experts worry they’ve already become established.

In an interview, Wolcott noted that the suspected positive sample from Canyon Ferry had come back negative — a glimmer of good news for officials grappling with the issue, but far short of giving the recreation hotspot a clean bill of health. More samples from the sprawling reservoir must still be analyzed, and teams of dogs specially trained to sniff out the mussels appeared to detect their presence during surveys at Canyon Ferry last month.

“Considering the economic and social impacts from something like this, we want to make sure everybody understands that the state of Montana is taking this seriously, and we’ve made it a high priority of every level of government,” Wolcott said.

A land manager with the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation office in Billings, Wolcott is one of two incident commanders overseeing a team of about 16 employees drawn from state agencies to coordinate the response.

Previously, Wolcott has worked on similar teams assigned to wildfires and other emergency situations, including the 2011 Silvertip oil spill that released 63,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River. Last week he was selected to head up the team assembled by Gov. Steve Bullock to address mounting concerns that invasive mussels have spread beyond Tiber Reservoir.

“We reached out to all of our partners in the state and federal agencies and hand-picked all the people that have the skills we need,” Wolcott said.

Team members are assigned to finance, planning and operations sections which are further split out into specific divisions. Wolcott added that they have also assembled specific task forces to assess the state’s needs (such as expedited sample testing), possible containment strategies and planning in the short, middle and long terms.

As those groups compile their findings in the coming weeks, the team will issue funding recommendations to the Governor’s Office to strengthen Montana’s detection, containment and educational efforts to minimize the damage.

“If the mussels are here, there’s a likelihood that we could be dealing with them in some aspect for a long time, so we want to make sure we’re dealing with them adequately,” he said. “It’s not a hopeless situation. There’s a lot of good things we could do.”