When was the first quagga mussel found in the United States?
The quagga mussel was first sighted in the Great Lakes in September 1989, when one was found near Port Colborne, Lake Erie, though the recognition of the quagga type as a distinct species was not until 1991 (Mills et al., 1996). In August 1991, a mussel with a different genotype was found in a random zebra mussel sample from the Erie Canal near Palmyra, New York, and after confirmation that this mussel was not a variety of D. polymorpha, the new species was named “quagga mussel” after the “quagga”, an extinct African relative of the zebra (May and Marsden, 1992).
