Zebra mussels have spread so fast that by 1989, they were all around Lake Erie with colonies up to 40 000 zebra mussels per square meter. In 1990, zebra mussels were seen throughout Lake Ontario, the upper part of St. Lawrence River, Lake St. Clair, as well parts of the other Great Lakes and the Erie and Welland canals (Hamilton, Super Species The Creatures That Will Dominate The Planet 189). In a little over two hundred years zebra mussels have been from continent to continent. .
One of the reasons why zebra mussels spread so fast is because they get help from humans, without humans being aware of what they are doing. People helped zebra mussels spread, by putting lake water and zebra mussels into their bait buckets, then they would dump their bait buckets through out the river, causing the zebra mussels to spread. Another way boaters helped the zebra mussels, is that the zebra mussels would grasp onto boats and motors using their byssal threads, and when owners would take their boats out of the water hundreds even thousands of zebra mussels could be on the boat. Since zebra mussels are able to survive for a couple days without water in moist weather, when the boaters would go to another lake, the mussels would drop into the new lake from the boat and distribute themselves throughout the lake( Gray, Zebra Mussel 16-19) . Due to this system, and people not being very knowledgeable about zebra mussels by 2010 two provinces have seen zebra mussels (Hamilton, Super Species The Creatures That Will Dominate The Planet 190). Knowledge is power, if people start educating other people about what zebra mussels are and what they do, if people did that the population of zebra mussels would decrease.
Not only do zebra mussels spread very quickly they also create many types of problems. Zebra mussels and other mussels are similar because, they both attach themselves to hard surfaces. As the number of zebra mussels increase, the numbers of native mussels decrease, due to bio-fouling.