Person of The Week Tackles Pest of The Week

By Cathy Miller

Trout season opens on April 9, a sure sign that spring has sprung, and water recreation is open for business. Christa Reeves, a water quality specialist, offers a look at one of the biggest threats to the Musconetcong River and its fish, urging all anglers to be vigilant when it comes to the invasive New Zealand mudsnail.

Inside Warren’s Person of the Week is Christa Reeves. She was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida and currently resides in the Poconos. A chef for a short time, she ultimately decided the rigors of the kitchen were not for her. She moved to Washington (Warren County) in 2011 and fell in love with the rivers in this region.

She attended Warren County Community College then went on to pursue a degree in science, graduating from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania in May, 2019 with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies with a focus in Stream Ecology and a minor in Geography with a focus in Geographic Information Systems.

Her involvement with the Musconetcong Watershed Association began in 2015 when she volunteered for a year. Turns out the rigors of water monitoring suited her just fine! She interned with the MWA for three more years, then became a Water Quality Field Specialist for two years. For the past year and a half, she’s been the Water Quality Program Coordinator, where among other things, she researches grants – to study the impacts of a restoration or post-dam removal water quality, as well as general water quality monitoring.

Outside MWA, Reeves is a Research Field Specialist for Northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania with Stroud Water Research Center as part of the EnviroDIY, a continuous sensor project, in coordination with the Delaware River Watershed Initiative and Vice President of the newly formed Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society.

Pest of the Week

Inside Warren’s Pest of the Week is the New Zealand mudsnail, an invasive species first detected in the United States in 1987. With no natural predators here, its densities have grown to the point of endangering the food chain by outcompeting native snails and water insects for food, leading to sharp declines in native populations. Fish populations suffer because the native snails and insects are their main food source. This is called trophic cascade.

Over the course of three years, one female mudsnail can potentially produce 40 million offspring! They can live for 24 hours without water. They can survive up to 50 days on a damp surface, giving them ample time to be transferred from one body of water to another on fishing gear. They may even pass through the digestive systems of fish and birds.

Currently, there is no natural remedy to stop their spread. To prevent further infestation of the snail, anglers will find MWA’s Decontamination Stations at popular fishing spots along the Musconetcong River where they can easily clean the mudsnails from their gear before it hitches a ride to a new section of the river. Additionally, cleaning gear at home with a scrub brush and/or 409 spray is effective against the snail, as well as freezing gear for 24 hours. By slowing the spread, the health of the Musconetcong can be maintained until a natural remedy is found.

The presence of mudsnails can severely impact three areas: recreational, economic, and environmental. Reeves tailors her message to her audience.

Reeves said, “When I’m talking to kids or adults, I explain that if the mudsnails eat all the nutrients in the river, the fish don’t get the food they need and they’ll die. Everyone wants to be able to keep fishing – many are lifelong anglers, growing up here, or coming here with their parents. They have their favorite fishing spots that they want to protect.”

She continued, “When I address water quality professionals, there’s a lot of municipal representatives present too. They want to keep environmental recreation going, they want that tourism money coming into their municipalities. So you meet them on the financial side of it.”

Reeves added, “If I’m at the New Jersey Water Quality Council meetings, I talk in terms of ecological damage, for example, trophic cascade, where you take away a piece of the food web or replace it with something else and it collapses. I talk to them in terms of science and ecology.”

Summarizing, she noted that “in all cases, I explain the consequences of not doing what could be done to help the situation.”

Searching along the Muskie on this chilly morning, Reeves was thrilled to find only a few mudsnails. She commented, “There’ve been times when you could see them from ten paces away because a rock is so covered with them, meaning they’ve pushed the beneficial insects that are native to the area out. Today, having a hard time finding them was a good thing. Every rock I picked up I saw water pennies, mayflies, caddisflies. By some kind of magic, the Musconetcong is keeping them at bay for now – maybe we won’t be overrun.”

Nancy Roberts-Lawler, with Peace NJ and a colleague of Reeves, added, “One of the things we know about the New Zealand mudsnails is that they eat algae off the rocks. When you have a lot of snails, the rocks no longer have algae on them. Certain organisms need algae to survive – water pennies, mayflies, caddisflies and some others. When you see the water pennies, you know there’s enough food for the other organisms. When you see lots of mudsnails, you know that area is unable to support those important insects that form the food chain.”

Reeves admitted, “We don’t know enough about mudsnails to know how to keep their numbers down.” She explained, “Even though they reproduce clonally, there are some limiting factors we’ve observed. They don’t like the water to be too deep or too fast, and the Musconetcong is a very fast river. They seem to hug the shoreline. It could be the chemistry of the water. The Musconetcong is limestone influenced and has a unique chemistry that goes along with that. It could keep them from forming their shells in a more robust way so they’re easily crushable. It also means that the overall salts are higher in the Musconetcong. They may be able to survive but not thrive.”

At a mere 1/4”, mudsnails are difficult to spot when they first invade an area. Reeves explained. “Since an infestation could just be a few hundred at first, we are implementing a new monitoring program up and down the length of the watershed called EDNA (environmental DNA). We collect water samples, filter them, and look for the mudsnail’s DNA. You can detect early on if the snails are going to be in an area or not. They shed material into the water as they grow. We’ll be working closely with Fish and Wildlife and Rutgers University on a new initiative this summer to get that pilot program up and running.”

The River Watchers, a group of MWA volunteers, is basically Reeves’ “army of para-professionals.” They apply a variety of tests to assess and monitor the health of the Musconetcong River at different sites. Many of them live along the river. They see the changes. They have a depth of knowledge the state doesn’t have. Trained in DEP protocols, their data is accurately recorded and reported in the requisite format. Reeves has 60 people reporting this information, where the state may have 15. The DEP is very supportive of these citizen-based efforts. As Nancy quipped, “There’s more eyes and hands and ears on the river!”