Most Great Lakes boat owners have heard of hull-fouling, according to John Fairlie at West Marine boating store in Kings ton.

It’s the gradual process of algal and zebra mussel accumulation along the bottom of a submerged boat.

“It slows your boat right down; it’s relentless and it forms very quickly,” Fairlie said.

It’s why many local boating supply centres stock antifouling paints, Fairlie said, which are applied to prevent organisms from growing on the hull.

For the most part, they’re highly toxic. The most popular antifouling paint Fairlie stocks contains 25% copper and 28% copperous oxide heavy metals that can bioaccumulate in the food chain.

“We sell masks and gloves to wear when you’re applying some of the products,” he said. “When you sandblast them off, especially,” during annual hull maintenance, he said, “you need to wear a mask. You don’t want to get this stuff in your lungs.”

The paints are ablative, Fairlie said, meaning they wear away over a season, or get chipped and sandblasted off during annual maintenance. While the idea of copper flakes chipping off into the lake is unappealing, Fairlie said antifouling is a standard procedure for sail and power boaters alike.

“If your boat is staying in the water more than a week, you have to have this stuff,” he said.

Antifouling paints are registered and regulated by Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Industry. Certain heavy metal compounds, such as tributyl tin, are banned.

“This is a Canadian-approved product,” Fairlie said, though copper antifouling paints were recently banned in Washington state on vessels less than 65 feet long.

John Schetz is a researcher at the University of Northern Texas Health Science Centre at Fort Worth. He spent years investigating non-toxic, naturally occurring compounds as potential inhibitors to zebra mussel and other organisms’ attachment to boat hulls.

“The best (antifouling paints) for now generally are poisons, for obvious reasons,” he said.

“People didn’t used to care about (toxicity) too much,” he said, “because they said, ‘oh, it’s only a little bit.’ But now, 30 years later, people are worried. … It’s mostly the heavy metal approaches people are worried about.

“There’s also a zinc-containing coating, zinc pyrithione,” he said, “which is actually also in dandruff shampoo.”

Banning copper will likely soon be more widespread, Schetz said.

“A number of heavy metal strategies have been implemented,” by Environment Canada and the American Environmental Protection Agency, he said, including a jointly implemented 2001 strategy to virtually eliminate heavy metals from the Great Lakes.

“Copper is allowed, but it’s getting more and more restricted. … The next wave of environmental regulations are coming up and they will try to reduce the amount of copper that’s al-lowed.”

Collaborating with Robert McMahon, a world-renowned expert on mollusks at the University of Texas at Arlington, Schetz said they’ve identified and patented non-toxic, naturally occurring compounds that stop zebra and quagga mussels from attaching to boat hulls.

The compounds are so innocuous that they don’t even hurt a water flea — the “non-target organism” used to gauge the environmental toxicity of the compound.

He said finding a commercial application, such as commercially- available hull coating, is a hypothetical next step.

“It’s one thing to say, but it’s a technological leap to do it. Could we do it tomorrow? No. But one could be developed if there were funding to do so.”

Funding for research on fresh-w ater organisms, at least in Texas, dried up a few years ago, Schetz said.

“Marine systems, that’s where the action is now. … The buildup in marine systems is so severe that it affects the performance of ships, of fuel costs, and then there’s the international transfer of species as well,” he said.

“We got some funding to con-t inue our research from the Navy,” Schetz said, but the focus has moved to oceanic barnacles instead.

“A barnacle is very different from a mussel. But we have a lot of data to show that we can find eco-friendly ways to prevent the attachment of marine bacteria, algae sporelings, barnacles and cypriots.

“We don’t have one com-pound that works for all of them. But the point is that the mode of action is not toxicity.”

Fairlie believes that Kingston boaters would happily buy a non-toxic product if it became available.

“I personally think that that would be preferable,” he said.

In the meantime, Fairlie said, “this is what we have, this is what we sell. They’re fine products, but they’re all pretty toxic.”