Reproduction
The quagga mussel is a prolific breeder, possibly contributing to its spread and abundance. Dreissena are dioecious (either male or female) with external fertilization. A fully mature female mussel is capable of producing up to one million eggs per year. After fertilization, pelagic microscopic larvae, or veligers, develop within a few days and these veligers soon acquire minute bivalve shells. Free-swimming veligers drift with the currents for three to four weeks feeding by their hair-like cilia while trying to locate suitable substrata to settle and secure byssal threads. Mortality in this transitional stage from planktonic veliger to settled juveniles may exceed 99%.
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Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“Although Samuel had a depraved imagination—perhaps even because of this—love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: “Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.””
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