A day at the beach in Wisconsin's North Woods didn't used to go like this.
Candy Dailey spent a Fourth of July holiday splashing with grandkids on the sandy shore of Lake Metonga when she felt a nasty sting on her foot.
She didn't need to look down to know the culprit was a zebra mussel - cuts from the razor-sharp shells have become as unremarkable as bee stings since the mussels invaded Dailey's lake eight years ago.
The natives of the Caspian Sea region first turned up in North America in the summer of 1988, thanks to overseas freighters' long-standing - and ongoing - practice of dumping their contaminated ballast water in the Great Lakes, which are now home to more than 185 non-native species.
None has wreaked more damage than the mussels, which feast on Great Lakes plankton and have cost the region billions of dollars in starved fish populations, beach-trashing algae blooms and plugged industrial and municipal water intake pipes.
Now, this ecological mess is spreading inland.
"The Great Lakes are just a beachhead for invasions that are going to play out in lakes across the country in the next century," says University of Wisconsin ecologist Jake Vander Zanden. "It's just the start."
Dailey is painfully aware of this.
"I'm a nurse, so I knew to make it bleed and wash it out," she says of the cut suffered from the molar-sized mussels. "I dried it off and taped it."
Trouble came in the middle of the night when she woke with a throbbing, swollen foot. By morning a tell-tale red streak was creeping up her leg. By sunset she was taking a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
Dailey recovered from the bacterial infection, but her holiday was over.
It's not the kind of story that makes a headline. It's just one infection from one cut. It's just one person swimming in one inland lake.
The problem is Wisconsin has more than 15,000 inland lakes.
Politicians have tried for years to force overseas freighters to treat their ballast water - used to steady the ships - before discharging it at a Great Lakes port in exchange for cargo.
The shipping industry acknowledges the trouble it has pumped into the world's largest freshwater system, and its leaders profess a desire to do something about it.
Yet at the same time they have consistently fought regulations proposed by Great Lakes states to require freighters to install onboard ballast treatment systems, claiming they are impossibly stringent, expensive or inconsistent from state to state.
Members of Congress, meanwhile, have repeatedly vowed - and repeatedly failed - to craft an overarching national ballast law that is palatable to both the shipping industry and environmentalists.
The result is the door remains open to invasions, the most recent being the "bloody red shrimp" discovered in Lake Michigan in late 2006. There could well be others that have arrived since then; it can take years for populations to grow big enough to be noticed.
Biologists say the damage being done to the world's largest freshwater system cannot be overstated, but the problem has become bigger than the Great Lakes themselves. It's now clear the failure to slam the door on new Great Lakes invasions has consequences for everyday folks with cottages on inland lakes, places working-class people across the state like to claim as their favorite on Earth.
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