RAZOR SHARP

It's TINY TUESDAY and the theme is "...something special to you (me)."  Imagine witnessing the death of the largest inland lake in your state and you'll know why this is special to me as an aquatic biologist.
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These are the remains of millions of very tiny mollusks called Zebra Mussels (Dreissena polymorpha)...so named because of their zebra-like striped shells.  Native to southern Russia and Ukraine they are invasive species in the U.S. and got here in the ballast of sea going ships in the Great Lakes.  After off loading, ballast water is routinely discharged into the water in which the ship happens to be ported and the little Veligers, the free-swimming larvae of these mussels, go with that ballast water and are deposited in a new environment where they settle to substrate and grow into adults..
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These shells are about the size of your little finger nail.  They can grow in colonies of 100,000+ per square meter.  They are filter feeders, straining algae etc. from water and EACH one can filter a quart (1 liter approx.) of water a day.
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EXTRA: Shoreline of Lake Winnebago showing about 3 feet (a meter) of shoreline piled a foot deep (30cm) in old mussel shells.  This lake is 60+ miles (100km) long and 20 miles (32km) wide. The entire shoreline is "paved" with dead mussel shells like this.  And they are sharp as razors....gotta wear shoes in the water.
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Do the math......imagine how many zebra mussels inhabit this lake.......it's in the hundreds or thousands of trillions of them.  And what a stink when they die. They also clog water intakes and it costs millions of dollars a year to clean them out.
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BEST IN LARGE.