When you live on Wellers Bay, you expect certain things — but not this.

You expect tides to erode your shoreline. You get used to wildlife in your back yard.

You know that winter is going to bring new highs in snow drifts, and in the spring you expect the carcasses of zebra mussels to wash onto your shoreline — and worse, into your boat launch.

But you might not expect to see a driveway paved with mussel shells.

Lisa and Steve Osborne have lived off of Wellers Bay since 2003. In 2005, they walked into their boat house and found that they would not be able to lower the boat all.

One reason was the low water level. The second, and most alarming, was the astounding numbers of dead zebra mussels littering the bottom of their boat launch, clogging it up so much that building’s use was reduced mere storage.

“You couldn’t use it at all,” said Steve Osborne. “So I had to dig it.

“Then we started thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this pile?’ It just kept getting it bigger and bigger, we had to do something with it.

“So I put it in a wheelbarrow and took it to the driveway and started putting them into the holes in the driveway.”

Zebra mussels invaded the Great Lakes in the 1980s, spreading rapidly and reducing the number of phytoplankton, tiny creatures on which smaller fish feed.

The mussels are notorious for clinging onto the chains of buoys, weighing them down and increasing maintenance costs. One female can release up to one million larvae each year.

The larvae spread via currents and settle after about three weeks if the conditions are favourable. They will reproduce in about a year.

Each year the Osbornes’ shoreline accumulates about two full pickup truckloads of mussel shells.

“It was the most logical, environmental thing to do,” said Lisa. “What are you going to do? Put it in the dump? That’s just relocating a problem.”

Their driveway is now known as the zebra shell driveway. It has a white crushed-rock look, no smell and, other than the sweaty labour, is paved completely for free.

Continue reading the full article via Hard work takes mussels – Belleville Intelligencer – Ontario, CA.