The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Documenting Invasive Quagga Mussels in the Great Lakes

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Threats from the invasive Quagga mussel species are growing in deeper parts of the Great Lakes, just as zebra mussels have altered ecosystems in shallower water closer to shore. Quagga mussels compete for food with a number of young fish species, putting commercial and recreational fishing at risk, and also threaten historic wrecks. A look at how widespread the problem is, and efforts to control the invasive species, with the team behind documentary All Too Clear. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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make a first time donation and continue to discover your 2 Point TDO. You've probably heard of lampreys, Asian carp, and zebra mussels as the invasive species threatening the health of the Great Lakes. But another rival is now competing with local fish for food, the quagga mussel. Quadrillions, yes, quadrillions of them are now blanketing the cold, deep beds of lakes Huron and Michigan, and they are spreading. The damage caused by these tiny mussels and the work being done on both sides of the border to control them and increase threatened fish stocks

is the subject of a TVO original documentary series, now also a film. It's called All Too Clear. And we are joined now by the filmmakers, Yvonne Draper and Zach Melnick, the founders of the film production company, Inspired Planet. And we're delighted to welcome you both to TVO.

Thank you for having us. This is outstanding. No, this is great. OK. Yvonne, start us off. Quagga mussels first identified in the Great Lakes, like in the 1990s. They're not new.

So what reason did you think all these years later they would be ripe for a documentary treatment? Well, we actually live on the Saugain or Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron. And we noticed that it was really tough to buy whitefish from our local fisher. And we started digging into that story, and all signs kind of pointed back to the quagga muscle. And folks have probably heard of the zebra muscle. It's a cousin of the zebra muscle, but they're kind of interesting. They like to live a little deeper, and they don't need anything to attach to.

So that means the quagga muscle can live on any part of the Great Lakes all the way to the deepest, deepest depths. Are they worse than the zebra mussels, Zach? Oh yeah, there's thousands of times more quagga muscles than there ever were zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. And really on an ecosystem level, they're much more damaging.

They're basically, if you think of the food web as a pyramid, as we often learned about it back in science class, the bottom of that is algae and zooplankton and all the little critters that the fish like to eat. Well, the mussels, they're consuming the algae that's the bottom of that food web. So it leaves a lot less food available to the fish, like that you and I and many others like to eat.

And the whitefish in Lake Huron is the best, right? It really is fantastic. Sorry, whitefish. We like to eat you, but you're great. But the implications for this long term are what? Yeah, so we've seen a real drop in the whitefish populations around not only Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario. They're actually the most important commercial fish

species. So they're important for all those families that have fish for generations, also indigenous communities around the lakes. And it's not only the whitefish that are being affected. We love those whitefish, but we use the whitefish in the film as a focal point. But really, it's having whole ecosystem impacts.

It's changing the lakes probably more than anything since the glaciers. And you say lakes. You live on Lake Huron, right? OK. But this has the potential to go beyond Lake Huron? Yeah? So right now, if you went anywhere on any Great Lakes

south of Lake Superior, and you went out in a boat to about 100 feet or so of water, and you put down a robot like we like to do, there's a very good chance that what you're actually going to find is a bed of these invasive quagga mussels. This has sort of quietly and slowly been happening over the last couple of decades, but because us humans live on land, not deep down under water, people almost had no idea that this was happening. Sheldon, can I get a wide shot here of us

in the studio for a second? OK, see that screen there? Is that them? That's what they look like. Yeah, so this is quagga mussels. And as Zach said, if we went out anywhere in a boat right now and looked down, we'd see a field of these. How big are they?

They're about the size of your thumb. So they're not huge. But when you have each one of them can filter one to seven liters of water a day. And so if you have a quadrillion of them in a lake, that means that, for instance, all of Lake Huron is filtered in about a week. So that's changing how our water even moves in those lakes.

But it's really changing that whole system of life in the lakes. And people can't see that far down mostly, but what people have noticed is that, hey, Lake Huron is really clear now. And we think, oh isn't that amazing? No, it's not. But that's the muscles. The lakes are about three times clearer now than they were before the muscles. So they really are changing everything about our lakes. It's clear, which makes you think it's beautiful, but it's clear because it's

eating all the life in there. Yeah, basically there's nothing living in there. So that's not a good thing. How'd they get in there in the first place? Well, from the ballast water of cargo ships. There are a lot of good regulations in now that stop this from happening. But back in the 80s, that's how a lot of invasive species

got here, 80s and 90s. And so that's how these guys got here, along with the zebra mussel. And the zebra mussel did much better first around the shorelines, but these guys love to live way out in the middle of the lakes and just sort of cover that lake bottom, those places where humans just don't go.

We have got some, what do you call them, viz? Viz, we've got some viz we wanna show here. Shelton, number seven, let's get, this is some of the gear that you used to make the documentary. This is, I guess, underwater remote-operated drones? Is that what we're looking at here? Okay.

Yvonne, tell us what's neat about this. Yeah, so you probably heard about aerial drones, and we use a lot of that tech. We've now put it in robots that can go underwater. But robots, we can't send signals through the water the same way we can through the air, so it's always tethered. So we have a fiber optic tether.

So that allows us to see in real time, 4K from the surface, and we drive it around like a video game. The other cool thing about this is that it's got a battery that lasts up to 12 hours. So that means we can go down and we can spend time with animals underwater. And that lets us see behaviors that people just haven't seen before. And that's how we got all this cool footage for All Too Clear.

You don't have to go down there with it, though, do you? We don't. We drive it from the surface. And I mean, this has truly enabled, like we're just independent artist filmmaker types, right? But we get to kind of play James Cameron in this case. So we can use this technology and go right down to the very deepest part of Lake Superior, if we wanted,

and get this spectacular footage, which would be totally impossible before. And so it's really allowed us to tell this story at all in the first place. So like we took this camera down there, which gets incredible images in very low light. We could see these endless fields of muscles. And even the science people didn't know that that's what that looked like.

It was just really, I think, illuminating for a lot of people to just see that imagery. Well, I was actually gonna ask you about that. Did scientists know how significant the penetration was of these things into our lakes? They did. There have been science folks in both Canada and the US who have been tracking this change.

But you know, it was really hard for them to get the word out about it, right? Again, this is an invisible problem happening, you know, deep in the water. So that's where we think our role really is to come in and show people. So we can make those awesome images and bring it to life for people. It's a whole different thing than scientists writing reports about stuff. And I think when a lot of people think about underwater, they think about sharks and whales

and coral reefs, and those things are awesome and important. But not in Lake Huron. We all live right here on the Great Lakes. There's 35 million of us right here. So it was really our goal to shine a spotlight on that freshwater world that we live right next to. All right, now that you've shined that spotlight and we know what's down there,

does anybody plan to do anything about it? Well, there are some really amazing folks out there who are trying really hard. All of the things that are being tried right now are in the experimental stages. We've got some pesticides. Muscles are really sensitive to copper, so we've got a copper-based pesticides that's being tried out. We have some folks doing some genetic engineering.

We also have some folks that are just trying to plow them out of the way and see what happens. There's just so many muscles out there. It's basically a monoculture. So if you get rid of them what happens then? There's a lot of really great efforts but we're really just beginning our efforts to try to turn this thing around. What I can say is that there's folks also who are working on trying to help our native species make it through this tough time so that when we've figured something out with the mussels we'll still have those native fish for the generations to come. You may have noticed, Zach, Canada and the U.S. are not

getting along all that well these days, but I wonder if they're getting along well and working together well in hopes of solving this issue. Well, historically that's how it's been, right? This is a true partnership, a lot of work and money for the muscle issue and then science around it has come from the US they have a really big pot of money called the Great Lakes restoration initiative. And that's what a lot of the projects that we look at in all too clear, they were supported by this money. And it's really unclear what's going to happen with that now in the future. But I guess we just hope that our friends in the in the US and our and in Canada, we're going to be able to do that. And I think that's going to be a big part of the great lakes restoration initiative. And that's what a lot of the projects that we look at in all too clear, they were supported by this money. And it's really unclear what's going to happen with that now in the future. But I guess we just hope that our friends in the in the US and our and in Canada, we're going to be able to do that. And I think that's going to be a big part of the great lakes restoration initiative. And that's what a lot of the projects that we look at in all too clear, they were supported by this money. And it's really unclear what's going to happen with that now in the future. But I guess we just hope that our friends in the US and in Canada here can keep working on that really great relationship they have to work on issues like the muscle here to keep the legs healthy for the future. Now, I gather in the course of making this documentary, while you were looking for these muscles,

you happened upon something else. And we've got some viz of that as well. Sheldon, number 10, let's roll this. You found the wreck of a steam ship. Is this called the Africa? And it sank, what, 200 years ago? Yeah, this is indeed the Africa. It sank in 1895 with, unfortunately, all 11 crew members aboard. And we ended up finding the ship. We sank in 1895 with, unfortunately, all 11 crew members aboard.

And we ended up finding the ship. We worked with a lot of fishy folks. And there were some people doing a fish survey offshore with a very fancy sonar who found a bump and said, hey, you guys should check this out. So we went out with our robot. We put it down. And man, what a surprise. So you did not know that it was there?

No, we did not. No one knew it was there. man, what a surprise. So you did not know that it was there? No, we did not. No, we didn't know it was there. Please, surprise. Total surprise. And look at it, it's totally covered in these quagga mussels. Right? There's millions of them on this thing.

And they're slowly degrading the quality of that wreck, too. They sort of eat into it. They have acid in their waste that messes it up as well. So it's a problem for cultural heritage, because all of the deep water shipwrecks out there, south of Lake Superior really look like that today. So archeologists, when they go down, they don't see like the fine detail on a ship.

They just see like these masses of mussels. So it's really impacting both the ecosystem, but as well the cultural heritage of the Great Lakes. Did explorers who do this for a living and look around for this kind of stuff, did they know it was there, but had just never seen it? No, it was a total surprise to, you know, in the 1800s, steam ships were the transport trucks of their day.

And of course, people were always pushing the limits into winter to try to get that last run in. And there were many ships, like the Africa, that were lost in winter storms. And there's still hundreds, if not thousands, of ships out there in the Great Lakes that we still haven't yet found. On the bottom.

On the bottom. Just waiting to be discovered. Yeah, the Great Lakes are these vast places. And sometimes we forget that, living right here. But they're basically inland seas that are special anywhere in the world. It's pretty amazing. But at some point, the quagga mussels

are going to be so intense that they will destroy all of these old ships. Is that right? There's millions of them on there. There's so much weight. Eventually, delicate things will fall off. But things like World War II planes that have fallen in the lakes, they've actually, yeah,

their acidic waste has degraded them. They are falling apart faster than even the ships. So the problem is happening right now. Now, I know you didn't set out to make a documentary about the fate of the Africa. But having discovered it, did you look into the background of it and find out what it was all of?

Yeah? Like, what was it doing there? It was hauling coal from Ohio to Owen Sound. Oh, OK. of it and find out what it was all of? Yeah, like what was it doing there? It was hauling coal from Ohio to Owen Sound. And it was actually towing a barge and they were both hauling coal. And what happened was that the weather just got terrible in October and Africa went down.

The barge made it to shore. And that's why we know the story of what happened to the Africa because the captain of the barge made it to shore. And that's why we know the story of what happened to the Africa because the captain of the barge lived. And interestingly, after we found the ship and figured out that it was the Africa, we put the word out there and descendants of people who had family members who went down on this ship reached out to us and that was super cool.

And then we actually got to take the descendants of the captain out on our boat using the robot, took them down to look at the ship and see that resting place of their ancestors. And that was pretty cool to have that opportunity to share that moment with them. So Mr. Cameron, you have found your own Titanic. Lake Huron version, yeah. Lake Huron version of the Titanic. That's quite amazing, Mr. Cameron, you have found your own Titanic. Lake Huron version, yeah.

Lake Huron version of the Titanic. That's quite amazing, actually. Okay, back to these mussels now. We know that there are all sorts of scientific endeavors that have been undertaken for many decades to look into the zebra mussels, Asian carp and that kind of thing. How fixated right now is official science on trying to get to the bottom of this and do something about it?

There do seem to be a number of projects and a number of working groups, cross-border working groups, where people are trying to figure out what we can do. And it does seem like this insurmountable problem, but folks might remember in the 60s, we had this thing called the Sea Lamp Ray come in. And we thought, oh, our fish are goners. Our fisheries are done.

But we figured it out. We put a lot of money, we put a lot of effort into trying to manage the lamprey. And I think that if we're able to put that same momentum behind trying to manage these mussels, there's definitely hope for us and for our fish in the future. You touched on this earlier, but I think it's worth going at this one more time.

Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency in the United States is taking a meat cleaver, not particularly skillfully, I think we can say, to all sorts of government spending right now. Maybe some of it is a good idea. Clearly, there have been things caught on the crossfire right now that props not to be cut. How concerned are you that you're about to see an end to all of this research and scientific effort in this area? Well, I'll say that every single one of the groups that we worked with on All Too Clear

in the US is now facing serious cuts. So we don't know what's going to happen. I know that all of the research that was happening up till right now is essentially frozen. So no one knows really what's going to happen, but hopefully our friends in the US will just realize what a wonderful shared resource that we have here and that it's really a benefit for us to work together

to try to keep it healthy. We don't want to be alarmist here, but obviously you two made this documentary because this is an issue you care about and you are concerned about. So if for whatever reason the budgets for these things are cut and this work stops, what are the implications? Well, nature is resilient, right? and this work stops, what are the implications?

Well, nature is resilient, right? And so whether or not us humans are here and nature is doing things that us humans want, over time, nature has a great power to heal itself. And so we have great faith in that. In fact, we see that happening a little bit already. So there are unexpected changes that these mussels have caused that have caused some species

to actually do better. We talked about the whitefish, who's not doing very well, but species like the lake trout might actually be benefiting a little bit from them. So it's a complicated world. It's not something we need to, I think, necessarily despair about, but it's a huge change. And I think it's just useful for people to know about it.

But the other part of our mission is just to show people how cool it is down there. We've got some viz of that. Can we show this, Sheldon? Number 14 here. This is, let's take a look at this footage here. This is really quite something. Now take it again, for people listening on podcast

who can't see this, take us through what we're seeing here. So this is the first known recording of Lake Whitefish spawning. And you have a male kind of getting up beside the female. And this has never been seen before. And they go vertical, and they start to vibrate together in this dance. And you can see that the female releases some eggs,

and the male releases some sperm. And those eggs go down into the, they call it a freshwater reef and those eggs stay down there until the spring when they're born into little whitefish babies. You got that footage. We did, yeah. That has never been seen before.

So far as we and our science friends know. And of course, whitefish like to do their thing in the end of November, early December, and we got this footage while it was snowing and we were both sick. So one of the reasons people haven't seen it before is because usually the weather is really quite horrible when it's happening.

And the drone technology really allows us to swim with the fishes in a way that just simply wasn't possible before. You wanna do that as opposed to sleep with the fishes. Which we remember. That's a different movie to sleep with the fishes. Which we remember. That's a different movie. That was The Godfather, if I remember. It's a different movie.

How much is it to get one of those devices down there? Like that underwater drone looks like a very sophisticated piece of equipment. How much is that? It's on the pricey side, for sure. But it is within the reach of independent entrepreneurial filmmaker types, right? So where before you need to be James Cameron to have the same kind of image quality and

technology which is millions of dollars, but this is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands. Well, you can't just reach into your back pocket for that. So where'd you guys get the money to make this movie? CBO. Well, CBO pitched some, right? Yeah, a bit. But it was actually a lot.

There was a couple of environmental charities here in Canada. Georgian Bay Forever was one of them. And then in the US, the Nature Conservancy. And we also got some support from the science community as well, who wanted to help us film these wildlife events and show people how these creatures were behaving. Because if we know how they spawn, for instance,

maybe there are clues that we can find to help them recover and stay really alive and thriving for the communities that rely on them in this new age of the quagga muscle. Every documentary filmmaker I've interviewed say they make documentaries not because they want to, but because they have to. There's something that just burns inside them to tell a story because they want

to see some particular positive impact happen as a result of their work. So Yvonne, what would be the positive impact you'd like to see happen as a result of this effort of yours? Well, I think we've had a really great working relationship with the scientific community and the indigenous communities around the lakes this whole time. Every time, you know, anyone who's ever gone fishing knows that the hardest thing is finding the fish.

So we would work with these folks to find the fish. And as soon as we got footage of the fish, we would share it with them. And that's been this great reciprocal relationship we've had going on. And as a result of that, we've got, you know, scientific papers being published from the work we're doing.

And as filmmakers, you know, we love having this great film, but now we're part of advancing the science on keeping the Great Lakes healthy and keeping our fish populations alive. And so for us, that's been a really amazing feeling and probably the best thing we could hope for coming out of this show. You use the word relationship.

And for those who don't know, how well do you two know each other? Pretty well. So Zach and I are a husband and wife filmmaking team. who don't know, how well do you two know each other? Pretty well. So Zach and I are a husband and wife filmmaking team. And we've been making films together for about 20 years. And we're still married. So there we go.

That's the achievement, right? That's amazing. How long have you known each other? We were high school sweethearts, actually. So over 20 years. That's absolutely adorable. And what number movie is this for you, too? Which number documentary?

We made about 40 hours of documentary film and television. So a number of series as well. So we're getting up there at this point. And you're still speaking? We do different things. I mean, Yvonne is extremely good at many things that I'm not as good at, and I think that's the best way to keep that partnership going in all ways for a long time. Gotcha.

You got a next project up your sleeves yet? Well, yeah. I mean, because of the success that we've had in just showing people the wonders, really, of the Great Lakes, we want to use this technology to keep telling these underwater stories to bring that magic of the freshwater world to life for people. So we hope to hear. I hope you'll be able to hear more about that in the near

future. Excellent. The name of this documentary is all too clear. We are happy to have partnered with you on it and helped make it happen. And Inspired Planet Productions. Keep going kids. Good stuff.

Good stuff. Thanks Steve. Yvonne Drabert and Zach Melnick. Thanks so much. Thank you.