Mussel Dogs muscle in to keep intruders out of lakes

Nemo, Noah and Popeye.

Their names may not carry quite the coolness of some of their current and former canine colleagues in local law enforcement – Cash, Volk, Samson, Zeus – but the decidedly marine monikers fit perfectly what this trio is trained to do.

They’re the Mussel Dogs, and they guard reservoirs, lakes and other waterways against intruders that, while not criminals, are killers.

Quagga and zebra mussels are invasive species that cannot be eradicated once they infest a body of water, said Denair resident Debra DeShon, who founded Mussel Dogs in 2008 and has three canine-and-handler teams.

The work her teams do is preventive. “We’re checking boats before launch, at the entrance station or ramp, because if a boat’s been in infested water and mussels are attached, they can live up to 30 days,” she said.

Locally, her teams work at Modesto, Woodward and New Melones reservoirs. The Mussel Dogs also help keep Lake Sonoma, Lake Mendocino and other California waterways free of the invasive mussels.

Keeping watch is important, DeShon said, because quagga mussels were found in January 2007 in Nevada’s Lake Mead, then in Arizona’s Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu and in the Colorado River Aqueduct System, which serves Southern California.

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, surveys also found quagga in Lake Dixon and San Vicente Reservoir in San Diego County. All reservoirs, lakes and watersheds receiving raw Colorado River water have been exposed to quagga mussels, according to the department. And the first confirmed find of zebra mussels in California was at San Justo Reservoir in January 2008.

The mussels are natural in parts of Europe such as the Caspian Sea, DeShon said. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they crossed the Atlantic in the ballast tanks of ships that arrived at the Great Lakes. It wasn’t until 2007 that they crossed the 100th meridian to the West, where they were found in Lake Mead, she said.

“They’re filter feeders, so they change the ecosystem,” DeShon said. “They eat the Daphnia and plankton that other animals would eat.” Those creatures die off, and “that affects fish because that’s what they eat.”

The mussels’ filtering clears up water, but that’s not a good thing. The clear water can let ultraviolet rays damage fish eggs. It also creates an environment that favors toxic algae, “so now you have another problem,” she said.

DeShon became a handler with Interquest Detection Canines in 1996, and when it franchised three years later, she was offered this area. She’s since operated four Interquest franchises and has been training and managing canine teams in the detection of illegal drugs and other contraband.

In 2008, while living in La Grange, a friend who ran the water district invited DeShon to a Fish and Wildlife demonstration of its quagga-sniffing dogs. Other than state agencies, no one was training mussel-detection dogs – and to her knowledge, that’s still the case – “so I was like, well, no one else is doing it, I’ll do it.”

“It took 2 1/2 years just to get a permit to have the mussels for training, so I didn’t even have my first dog until 2010,” she said. Nemo, Noah and Popeye all are Labs or Lab crosses, and males, but that has nothing to do with them being effective detection dogs. It’s more temperament than breed – the dogs have to be “ball crazy,” doing the work for the reward of getting to play.

At Certified Auto and Marine in Denair, DeShon ran each dog through a test Thursday. She’d tuck a dead mussel into a nook or cranny on a boat and let a leashed dog sniff around until it sat down, indicating it had found something. There’s no pawing against a hull, she said, as boat owners with $30,000 paint jobs wouldn’t appreciate that.

In real action, the dogs have detected no mussels yet, which is good, DeShon said. That means there have been none to find, not that the Mussel Dogs have missed them, she said. DeShon is permitted to work with only dead, frozen mussels, but that doesn’t change the scent. “When they have the opportunity with Fish and Wildlife to train with lives ones, they find them every time,” she said.

Woodward, Modesto and New Melones pay for Mussel Dogs inspections through a grant program that began about a year ago, DeShon said. “When people register a boat, they buy a mussel sticker, an extra $16 the DMV charges, and the money goes to grants specifically for the prevention of mussels,” she said. The local reservoirs applied for and received grant money, and use some of it for the canine detection.

“When I do Sonoma, the water agency there pays from its own budget,” she said. “They know how much it would cost to clean if the lake got infested and mussels plugged pipes and filters.”

DeShon said she’s worked hard to get to the point where people recognize the value of the dogs. In June, she went to Washington, D.C., for the annual awards reception held by the Reduce Risks From Invasive Species Coalition. There, she was honored for “outstanding achievement by a private-sector company in protecting America’s environment and economy.”

In a news release, coalition President Scott Cameron said, “Mussel Dogs has given us a significant technological breakthrough in the difficult fight against invasive zebra and quagga mussels. They did it by tapping into one of the most sensitive detection instruments known to man, a dog’s sense of smell.”

This story was originally published August 28, 2016 at 4:25 PM with the headline "Mussel Dogs muscle in to keep intruders out of lakes."