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My cousin in Washington says that state is looking into whether to use mussel-sniffing dogs at boat-inspection stations to check for zebra and quagga mussels. Sounds like the dogs can just sniff your boat for mussels much faster than an inspector can. Is this something Oregon has looked at and, if not, will they? — Megan F., Medford Mussel-sniffing dogs have become the new dandy among zebra and quagga mussel-inspection teams throughout the West, because they can cut a boat inspection down to a small fraction of what they do here in Oregon. It’s simple: The dogs are trained to smell the offending mussels, and they can give a boat a green light with just a little walk-around. So, will we be getting our boats sniffed at Interstate 5’s Port of Entry near Ashland? Don’t bark on it. “It’d be cool, but probably not,” says Rick Boatner, who runs the invasive species inspection stations for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The stumbling blocks are the cost and main benefits of going dog, Boatner says. Washington will be paying $60,000 to find a dog, train it and train the handler, and that might make sense there, because Washington check stations can get back-ups of 20-plus cars, Boatner says. Ashland is Oregon’s busiest check station, and it rarely gets more than a two-boat wait, he says. “I don’t know how practical they’d be for how we’re set up,” Boatner says. Mussel Dogs was founded in 2008 by Debi Deshon, who was already a successful dog-trainer for drug-detection dogs. She switched over to mussels because of the continued need to keep these dangerous invasives from getting transferred from infected waterways to uninfected ones by boat. Quagga and zebra mussels are filter-feeders that syphon water to pluck out microscopic organisms, and they can throw food chains out of balance. Their sheer numbers when they attach to surfaces can clog pipes at reservoirs and damage boat motors. Giant water bodies turning aquamarine blue is a sign that the base of the food chain is being depleted, risking starvation for other species, including sport fish. Since their discovery in Nevada’s Lake Mead in 2007, they have multiplied so fast that scientists estimate the entire volume of the lake is filtered by the mussels every five days. One estimate put an annual cost of dealing with invasive mussels in the Columbia River alone at $25 million should they populate that river. The Ashland boat-inspection station is open year-round and it is mandatory for all boats to stop for an inspection. Its average of about 7,500 inspections annually leads Oregon. Decontaminations are free. The stations are funded through the $5 annual invasive-species permit needed for all boats more than 10 feet long. Send questions to “Since You Asked,” Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by email to [email protected]. We’re sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them.