NEWPORT, Vt. — They might hitch a ride on a boat hull; they might ride in on a wave.

They are zebra mussels, the damaging mollusks that rapidly infested Lake Champlain, and now officials of the towns that share the Lake Memphremagog shoreline are teaming up to make sure they’re not next.

“Life revolves around the lake,” said Newport Town Manager Ken Magoon. “[Zebra mussels] come in, and the lake is dead.”

The dozen or so towns on the Quebec side of Lake Memphremagog require boaters to wash their vessels before putting them into the lake to reduce the risk that boats will carry in the tiny mussels in bilge water or attached to the hull. Six washing stations have been built on Memphremagog’s shores.

No boat-washing ordinances exist in Vermont, and there are no zebra mussel washing stations at docks on the Vermont side of the Memphremagog. But now Newport is putting the final touches on a washing station it built in town.

“This is why Magog hired me; it was to get Vermont going,” said Raymond Cloutier, a Quebec environmental management expert who works with all the towns that share the lake. “We’ve been yelling since 1987 that we were surely going to have to organize something here.”

The small striped zebra mussels, natives of Europe, are thought to have arrived in North America in the 1980s when they were carried into the Great Lakes in the ballast of an ocean-going freighter. They were first discovered in southern Lake Champlain three years ago.

The mussels can clog the inlet pipes for water and sewage plants, foul boat keels, and litter beaches with their sharp shells.

“It’s an incredible problem,” said Kevin Coffey, an Irasburg resident who serves on the board of the Lake Memphremagag Watershed Association. “They’re so prolific that they actually wipe out the other mussel species that are in the lakes.”

No mussels have yet been found in Memphremagog, a majestic high-altitude body of water that stretches almost 30 miles and straddles the Vermont-Quebec border.

In all, the lake covers 37 square miles or about 24,000 acres, said Kevin Hauser, a zebra mussel specialist at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. About 75 percent of the lake is in Quebec.

For the Vermont towns that share the lakeshore, Memphremagog is a captivating focal point as well as a spectacular opportunity for tourism and recreation in the winter and summer. An entrepreneur recently trucked a paddleboat onto the lake for excursions in the summer months. And town officials estimate that literally thousands of boaters and fishermen use the waters each year.

“It’s a very busy lake,” said Bob Orr, Derby’s selectboard chairman. “People come from all over.”

Memphremagog is especially important to the dozen or so Quebec towns, with about 150,000 residents, that depend on it for their drinking water, Cloutier said.

Quebec officials became concerned in the early 1990s when they perceived that for all of their efforts, zebra mussel pollution could well enter their waters from the unregulated lakeshores to the south while the issue languished in state and local files.

That’s when they hired Cloutier.

Now Vermont is starting to get with the program, say lakeshore residents who have been watching the zebra mussel threat closely.

Derby and Newport officials are discussing the problem with Quebec officials. And more importantly, the first washing station funded jointly by those towns opened this month in Newport.

Signs at boat landings will direct boaters to the station, located at the town garage. The station, staffed 12 hours a day by an attendant, will provide a hose with high-pressure hot water for rinsing off boats. It will be free.

“I’m happy that the city of Newport is doing this at least,” said Coffey. “They’re playing catch-up to the Canadian side.”

Although Quebec has enacted ordinances with fines for boaters who fail to wash their boats, Magoon and Orr were pessimistic about the chances of getting similar measures passed in their towns any time soon.

“This year it’s going to have to be a conscience thing,” said Orr.

Cloutier credited alarm about the mussels’ impact on Lake Champlain with prompting the towns’ action on protecting Memphremagog.

“[Lake Champlain] is infested except for the eastern arm of the lake,” said Cloutier. “That is only protected by a causeway. How long is it going to take? Maybe a year, and the whole lake is done, it’s cooked.”

And zebra mussels aren’t the only problem. Other non-native species are being discovered in bodies of water where they don’t belong, he said.

“There are tons of things lurking all around,” Cloutier said. “What is going to happen next year? What is going to happen next summer that we don’t know is coming?”