Botulism takes fatal toll on thousands of Great Lakes birds

Botulism and the infamous zebra mussel are blamed for killing birds
- from gulls to loons - by the thousands
By James Janega

The bird die-off was obvious as soon as Gary Rentrop and his English setter turned onto the Lake Michigan shore. The sugar-white sand, long buried in the crushed gray shells of invasive mussels and mats of rotting algae was now, suddenly, littered with dead birds.

"It was almost like a war zone of birds," said Rentrop, a Michigan lawyer who recalled his November stroll along a Michigan beach.

Rentrop counted 80 carcasses on a remote mile of beach near Cross Village, just a fraction of the estimated thousands of dead mergansers, gulls, loons and other birds whose migration last autumn ended in deadly poisoning from Type E botulism on Lake Michigan.

The mounting toll on migrating birds has stoked fears among researchers and ecologists that blame for the deaths lies with invasive populations of zebra mussels and round gobies -- which arrived in ballast tanks in the 1980s and 1990s -- spreading over the Great Lakes and effectively creating a new food chain. [Read on...]

The Zebra mussels that are in the Great Lakes here have always been a concern. If you go boating you have to wash the boat bottom, before you drop it in new waters. I never realized what a rising threat they were to the wildlife until I read this article!

thats crazy. Thats worse then the dead birds we had here last summer. A red tide kind of thing.

That is so sad!