By: Emily Green
The dime-sized creatures are causing so much algae growth that some areas of the lake have changed from pristine blue to green.
Schladow: “What the mats do is deprive the clams and all living organisms under them of oxygen. So within a period of about a day and a half, oxygen drops to zero and then it takes about a month for the clams to actually succumb.”
Schladow says the clams may have come to Tahoe as people dumped the contents of their home aquariums into the lake. Now, the hope is the rubber mats will kill the Asian clams, and allow native species to repopulate Lake Tahoe quickly.