At APM, I put my inflatable SUP in the water Thursday June 14 at 11 a.m. and pulled it out of the water Saturday June 16 at 8 a.m. - it was in the water for 45 hours.
I set it on its side to dry and noticed many little black specs on the bottom of the board - about 20 easily visible specs. I thought they were just wood specs from the water. But picked several off of the board and they were mussels with a shell formed - probably 1-2mm size. You can see one in the photos below, but look closely and you can see when I zoomed in on the larger mussel in the second photo, a much smaller mussel - probably .2mm - just below it and to the right in the photo that was invisible to the eye without magnification. With the knowledge that the .2mm little black spec is a mussel also, I'd say the SUP had hundreds of mussels attached to the bottom in various stages of development! After only 45 hours in the water.
This tells me, and hopefully is informative to all of us, that mussels are on EVERYTHING we pull from the water - ropes, anchors, SUP, tubes, wakeboards, hulls, engines/outdrives, swimsuits, etc, even if you can't see them, thus the importance of abiding by the clean/drain/dry NPS rules at all times and following decontamination rules for boats launching anywhere besides LP if out of the water less time than required. -Doug
p.s. - to me this shell looks more like a snail than a mussel, but I've never seen snails in LP, so I assume the look is just part of mussel life-stage development.
p.s.s. - updated comment - if these are some sort of snail, I still had over 20 of them on the bottom of my SUP in 45 hours, and likely hundreds more smaller ones that looked like specs visible under magnification. If they are snails, maybe even more than mussels I'd like a response from someone with knowledge of this!
I set it on its side to dry and noticed many little black specs on the bottom of the board - about 20 easily visible specs. I thought they were just wood specs from the water. But picked several off of the board and they were mussels with a shell formed - probably 1-2mm size. You can see one in the photos below, but look closely and you can see when I zoomed in on the larger mussel in the second photo, a much smaller mussel - probably .2mm - just below it and to the right in the photo that was invisible to the eye without magnification. With the knowledge that the .2mm little black spec is a mussel also, I'd say the SUP had hundreds of mussels attached to the bottom in various stages of development! After only 45 hours in the water.
This tells me, and hopefully is informative to all of us, that mussels are on EVERYTHING we pull from the water - ropes, anchors, SUP, tubes, wakeboards, hulls, engines/outdrives, swimsuits, etc, even if you can't see them, thus the importance of abiding by the clean/drain/dry NPS rules at all times and following decontamination rules for boats launching anywhere besides LP if out of the water less time than required. -Doug
p.s. - to me this shell looks more like a snail than a mussel, but I've never seen snails in LP, so I assume the look is just part of mussel life-stage development.
p.s.s. - updated comment - if these are some sort of snail, I still had over 20 of them on the bottom of my SUP in 45 hours, and likely hundreds more smaller ones that looked like specs visible under magnification. If they are snails, maybe even more than mussels I'd like a response from someone with knowledge of this!
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