written by Alexander Karatayev and Lyubov Burlakova
For the last three years, we have collaborated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), working on joint proposals, presentations, publications, and scientist exchange. In the summer of 2022, Ph.D. student Linda Haltiner from Eawag visited and joined us on a benthic survey of Lake Huron on the Canadian Coast Guard coastal research and survey vessel Limnos. In the summer of 2023, Lyubov Burlakova and Alexander Karatayev visited Eawag and presented several talks at a seminar and a workshop “SeeWandel - Life in Lake Constance – the past, present and future.”
Last year we published a joint paper, “An abundant future for quagga mussels in deep European lakes,” by Benjamin Kraemer, Salomé Boudet, Lyubov Burlakova, Linda Haltiner, Bas Ibelings, Alexander Karatayev, Vadim Karatayev, Silvan Rossbacher, Raphael Stöckli, Dietmar Straile, and Piet Spaak in Environmental Research Letters. In this paper, we applied knowledge from our long-term quagga mussel monitoring efforts in the Great Lakes to predict future populations of mussels in deep European lakes, where they are quickly becoming a conspicuous part of the underwater landscape. We predict that quagga mussel biomass in European pre-alpine lakes, including Biel, Constance, and Geneva, may increase by a factor of 9–20 by 2045, causing serious ecological consequences and increasing operation expenses for industry using raw water by billions of dollars.
In February, our collaborator Dr. Piet Spaak visited with a group of six staff members of Lake Constance Water Supply, Mr. Christoph Jeromin (CEO), Mr. Steffen Vogler (Project Management Department), Mr. Thomas Keierleber (Project Management Department), Mr. Christian Grüner (treatment facility department), Mr. Roland Schick (Head of Laboratory Department), and Mr. Michael Petri (Laboratory Department), to discuss how our knowledge of quagga mussel biology could be used in design of a new water supply plant on Lake Constance.
Starting November 2024, Lyubov Burlakova and Alexander Karatayev will be hosted by Dr. Piet Spaak in Eawag for six months to continue our work on predicting the distribution and effect of quagga mussels on waterbodies with different morphology in both Europe and North America. These predictions will be based on our knowledge of the distribution and effects of quagga mussels in the Great Lakes and other lakes in Europe and North America. This knowledge was accumulated throughout our career, especially during the last 11 years working on U.S. EPA-funded grant, “Monitoring of benthic invertebrates in the Great Lakes.” This collaborative project with experts in Eawag will result in several publications and presentations at scientific meetings, increasing the visibility of the Great Lakes Center and Buffalo State University.
Image caption: A meeting at the Great Lakes Center between Alexander (standing, second from left) and Lyubov (seated, left), Dr. Piet Spaak (seated, center), and the six members of the Lake Constance Water Supply in February 2024.
