Zebra mussels are back in Victoria Beach and appear to be worse than ever.
“The smell of rotting fish is what’s there when you walk along the beach,” resident Amos Bridgman said. “There’s a crunching sound as you step over these hundreds of thousands of bodies.”
Resident Amos Bridgman has been spending time at his family cabin for the last seven years. He remembers when the area was free of zebra mussels, before they were first found in Manitoba in 2013 and now contaminate a handful on lakes.
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“Seven years ago I could swim at any beach and be pretty comfortable with it,” he said.
Despite the abundance of these zebra mussels at Victoria Beach, the province is downplaying the discovery, saying they are from last year and are just visible now because of the melting snow.
“From an invasion perspective it’s normal, it’s what you’d expect to see, but Manitobans of course have not really seen this too often,” Aquatics Invasive Species Specialist Candace Parks said.
“It is still a new thing for them to see zebra mussels wash up on a beach.”
Still Bridgman said the invasion will keep him from enjoying the area this season and he fears the zebra mussels might keep others away too.
“This is going to become a tourism problem… and impact local markets in a whole variety of ways.”
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