Tiny Mollusk Eats Asian Carp Under The Table!

While Asian carp have been getting all the attention lately, scientists say another foreign invader is gobbling up all the plankton in southern Lake Michigan.

It's called the quagga mussel and it's about the size of a human thumbnail. First spotted in the Great Lakes two decades ago, it's such a voracious bottom feeder that the entire food chain is being altered. One expert says the mussels have "beaten Asian carp to the buffet table," fundamentally changing Lake Michigan and making it inhospitable to Asian carp.

Others insist the four foot-long, 100-pound carp can survive and even thrive in a plankton-depleted environment. "They are a very flexible fish," says Duane Chapman, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Quagga and zebra mussels are believed to have migrated from Europe to the Great Lakes in the ballast tanks of ocean-going freighers in the 1980s.

(Copyright 2010. WWJ Newsradio 950. The Associated Press contributed to this story.)