Trojan horse battles zebra mussels

The zebra mussel is an invasive freshwater species that fouls power-plant and industrial-plant water intakes and irrigation pipelines and annually causes billions of dollars in damage. The small bivalve now may have met its match with a Trojan horse strategy developed by University of Cambridge zoologist David C. Aldridge and his colleagues (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2006, 40, 975). Zebra mussels can be controlled by doses of chlorine, but that procedure has environmental drawbacks. Furthermore, mussels can sense chlorine and limit exposure by closing their valves for as long as three weeks. Aldridge and his colleagues realized that they needed to devise a way to get a toxic compound past the mussels' defenses. The team incorporated potassium chloride, which is deadly to zebra mussels but doesn't affect most other organisms, into small particles made up of vegetable oil, silica, and other materials. The mussels take in the particles, or "BioBullets," using their gills (shown) and transport them into their mouths. The particles rapidly dissolve in the stomach, releasing a lethal dose of potassium chloride.