The Current - An invasion at the bottom of the Great Lakes

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

The new documentary All Too Clear explores the darkest depths of the Great Lakes, and finds a vast carpet of invasive quagga mussels, numbering in the quadrillions. Guest host Peter Armstrong talks to filmmakers Zach Melnick and Yvonne Drebert about their deep dive into that ecological damage — and the century-old shipwreck they discovered along the way.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. There's quadrillions of quagga mussels in the Great Lakes. In a week's time, every gallon of water in Lake Michigan could have passed through a mussel. Those mussels created a system that is really now much different than what we had seen It's just incredible, the clarity of the lake. Clear water, from an aesthetic perspective, people kind of love that. But from an ecosystem's perspective, it really means nothing's there, nothing's growing.

The offshore waters have been described as a biological desert. That is from the opening of a new documentary called All Too Clear. The view it shows us is the depths of the Great Lakes is shocking. Vast carpets of quagga mussels, as you heard there, in the quadrillions. The filmmakers are husband and wife, Zach Melnick and Yvonne Drebert. They're with me now in our Toronto studio. Good morning to both. Good morning. Thanks for having us. Yvonne, let me start with you. What did you even think when you first saw that footage of all these mussels carpeting the bottom of the Great Lakes? Yeah, it was shock, actually. And we were working with a bunch of folks who have done science and worked on the fisheries on the Great Lakes for decades. And even those folks were shocked when we were able to show them what was going on under the waves with our robot. It's amazing. What was it like for you? Did you have a sense that it was

as sort of vast as this? We had a sense because we had images that science folks had been filming over the years that the cameras that have been available up until now were just not as good as what we're able to use. So we're able to get a great image in over 100 meters of water down there. So that's very deep. Which is kind of hard to see. It's moonlight. Yeah, it's extremely dark. It's like half a moon of light down there.

So we can have cameras now that can show us this vast landscape completely transformed by the mussels. I probably should have started with this. But what exactly? And am I even saying it right? Quagga muscle, what is this thing? Yeah, quagga muscle. Quagga, all right. Actually, the cousin of the zebra muscle,

which you might be familiar with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it came in at about the same time as the zebra muscle, but now they've out-competed the zebra muscle. And the reason we don't really see them is because they often like to start deeper. But now once you get down to,

if we got in a boat right now and went out anywhere on Lake Ontario and dropped our robot down to a hundred feet, I can pretty much guarantee you what we'd see is just a carpet of these mussels. They can colonize any part of the landscape. They don't need to stick to things like zebra mussels. Right. Because that was the trick with the zebra mussels is they'd stick to things and grow that way. If these just sit on the bottom, Zach, are they just like breeding like crazy down there? Absolutely. So they're able to each have up to one million babies per year. So these things have just proliferated.

But the crazy thing is that they love the deep waters where the zebra mussel love the shallow waters. Quaggas are just adapted to even the deepest, darkest, coldest depths of the Great Lakes. And do we know how the quagga mussels ended up here? Yeah, so we think they got here in ballast water of cargo ships, just like their friends the zebra mussels. Yeah, that's how those got here too, right? Yeah, and just like the round goby, that invasive fish. And not to put too fine of a point on it, but how big of a problem is this?

Well, it's hard to say. There's a lot of problems in the world, but for the, the Great Lakes, you know, we think this is probably the biggest ecosystem change to go on since the glaciers. I mean, there are so many, right, that they're able to filter all the water and lakes here on in Michigan, you know Michigan in a week or two. So that has fundamentally changed how the lower part of that food web works. And that affects things like algae, but affects the zooplankton, which the little fish eat.

It goes right up to the big fish that us as humans like to eat, especially the lake whitefish, which is the most important commercial fish species in the upper Great Lakes and of huge cultural importance to communities throughout the Great Lakes. In fact, that's when we first started getting into this, is that there's been a virtual collapse in this species around the Songin-Brus Peninsula, where Yvonne and I lived. And we kind of looked out our back door and wondered what the heck's going on out there.

And this is not just in Georgian Bay. It's throughout Georgian Bay. It's throughout Lake Huron. It's throughout Lake Michigan. It's having a really huge impact on communities, and almost nobody knows about it. It's funny how, for granted, we can take the Great Lakes water system because they're just right there. I have two 11-year-old sons who recently asked me a really simple question. What was happening here in Toronto during the ice age? And I'll be honest, I didn't know. And so we looked at it and we found this huge ice sheet. And then, you know, the melting and the Younger Dryas and the cold and everything came.

And we've gone down this rabbit hole. And it's a fascinating little bit of history and of information. And it's wild and interesting. How much did, like like as you say you guys are from Lake Huron how much is it just that simple looking at your window and saying what is going on out there that sort of sparked a lot of this absolutely you know we live on Lake Huron we look out there but almost nobody knows what the heck's going on out there and so we really wanted to to use this advanced new technology that allows us to go

to the deepest part of Lake Huron or Lake Superior. Yvonne and I can go out and check out the very deepest part of Lake Huron on a Tuesday, where before that would have cost, exactly, it would have been a huge ship. It would have required, it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a day just to go out there. But we've spent more than 150 days exploring the underwater world of the Great Lakes. And, you know, we started out looking at mussels, but we were able to film a whole bunch of stuff that no one has really been able to see before. And now filming underwater wildlife in the Great Lakes is really what we do. What is it with the cameras? Because it really is a really fast and incredible change in the technology we're using to document this. Oh, for sure.

So not only are cameras getting smaller and they have these amazing chips that basically let us see in the dark. The other thing that's happening is that the mussels are making the lakes about three times clearer than they were, you know, 30 years ago. Is that a fact? So now we can see. Because they eat up all the algae. They eat up all the algae. So now we can see, you know, 150 feet, 200 feet underwater. Whereas if we tried to do that, you know, in the 80s, we would have been able to see

10 feet, 20 feet. So, you know, this problem also allows us to see what's actually going on down there. And divers don't have that chip that, like, you can't see in the dark, right? Like, that's a pretty clear benefit right there. D divers don't have that chip that like you can't see in the dark, right? Like that's pretty clear benefit right there. Divers have certain limitations, right? They can only be under for so long. You know, we can go to 200, 300, 400 meters deep and that's very, very dangerous.

And it's extremely cold down there. Yeah. Right. So how cold is it down there? It's between like two and four degrees. Is it that? At the bottom of the lakes. At the bottom? All the time.

Because like Superior and Huron are so deep. Exactly, yeah. And the other thing that happens is that that robot has a 12-hour battery life, right? So that lets us spend time with fish and animals in a way that just hasn't been possible before. Right, right. And so we get to see things that even scientists are surprised by. And as you say, you got some pretty neat surprises. Tell me about the shipwreck you guys found. Yeah. So the ship we found was called the Africa. It went down in 1895 in an early season snowstorm

on Lake Huron. And unfortunately, all 11 members of the crew were lost. And so we came across this wreck. You know, it was just a Saturday in June. We took our friends out. We didn't quite know what we would find. We put down our robot and, you know, of course, lots of expletives that aren't allowed on radio. But then we had a mystery on our hands. What ship was this? Because, of course, it's all covered in quagga mussels. And we figured out it was a ship called the Africa.

And then we broke the story with our friends at Canadian Geographic. And then four descendants of Hans Larsen, the captain of the Africa, reached out to us. And actually, this past summer, we were able to take them out and put our robot down and show those descendants the final resting place of their ancestor. That's amazing. We've got some tape of that sort of behind the scenes. Let's take a listen here. It has survived surprisingly well. It was so fascinating to see the cargo inside. I can get right up against the side here. And let's have a look in here.

Oh, that looks like coal. Oh, it does, doesn't it? Oh, my. Let me just turn on some lights here. Oh, my heavens, look at that. Oh, it is coal. It is. Look at all that coal. here. Oh, my heavens. Look at that. Oh, it is cool. It is. Look at all that cool.

Wow. Oh, my goodness. I want to just count the number of times people went, oh, oh. What was that like? It must have just been jaw-dropping. I mean, it's the kind of thing that happens once or twice in your life, this time of true surprise and true discovery, once or twice in your life, this time of true surprise and true discovery. And then being there with people who have this deep, deep emotional connection to this story, you know, that's been 129 years in the making for the family. You know, it was something that you just don't experience

any other time. What do you think it was like for the family? Well, I don't think they knew really how powerful it was going to be, but then I think they did have a real emotional reaction to it. And it is quite shocking, right? I mean, these were folks in their 80s, right? So this whole technology is completely new as well. And so to be able to take them and to peer, you know, 270 feet underwater and to get this glimpse that they never thought they would, where they're the resting place of their ancestor, I is it's quite an emotional thing in 2017 it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news so i started a podcast called on drugs we covered a lot of ground over two seasons but there are still so many more stories to tell i'm jeff turner and i'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is.

I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. We talk a lot about the ecological impact of these quagga mussels and the impact that's had on these bodies of water. It also clearly, as the images showed, has an enormous impact on research and science and trying to figure out what happened to these kinds of things. Yvonne, what does it mean for those people that are out there trying to find these wrecks and trying to get information about what has happened in the history of these lakes? Yeah, when we started this show, we really were focused on the ecology, the environment.

But when we found the shipwreck, it really hit home the impact that these animals are even having on our cultural heritage. So the mussels are slowly burrowing into that wreck. They have these little sticky threads called bissel threads. They're building on top of each other, causing more weight. So slowly that wreck is going to fall apart because of these muscles. So those stories, that connection to our past, they're actually disappearing because of those quag muscles. And things like World War II planes that are under there. Right, because there's quite a few of those.

Yeah, and so the muscle waste is actually acidic. So it's happening even faster. They're destroying even faster metal artifacts of our history. And a lot of folks are on a quest to try to figure out, can we document these things before they're lost? I remember talking to somebody during the outbreak of the zebra mussels. And I was like, this is terrible. Oh my God, what can we do to stop this? And their answer was both prophetic. And I thought a bit of a joke. It was like, well, something else will come along and eat them, and that'll probably be a whole new set of problems. What can be done? And if these ones just took an old problem and made it worse,

is there a likelihood that the next wave of this will be even worse than the quagga mussels? Well, your friend was absolutely right. So a big reason that the zebra mussel is much less prolific now is because the round goby, another invasive species, which evolved with the zebra mussel in Eastern Europe, they came over as well and they can eat those zebra mussels when they're really small. That's right, yeah.

They can eat quagga mussels as well, but just the scale of that quagga mussel invasion is thousands of times greater than we ever saw with the zebra mussels. And so they're just not able to eat all those guys. And so is there anything we can do about it? You know, we looked far and wide while making this film

to try to find potential solutions. There's a lot of work being done in the United States that has some potential, but right now, you know, we basically have to wait for nature to try to adapt to this ecosystem change. The Great Lakes are unique in a whole bunch of ways, but also in that it's a multi-jurisdictional area.

Is somebody doing something that we can learn from somewhere else that might apply to this if we can all get our sort of ships going in the same way? A lot of the most interesting work that's being done is actually being spearheaded by the indigenous communities and First Nations around the Great Lakes because they can just move a little faster than some of those traditional institutions, government institutions. And so one of the cool things that we followed was some work by folks with the Sioux tribe from northern Michigan. And they're doing some pretty amazing work with the whitefish to try to help them adapt

to this new environment. If we can help them get through right now, those populations survive this moment, maybe that'll give them enough time to adapt to live in this new world created by the mussels. So what they're trying to do is to restore the ancient, forgotten really, river-run whitefish. All around the Great Lakes, the whitefish, the species most impacted by the quagga mussel, they used to spawn in rivers as well as way out in the Great Lakes. But those river populations were all wiped out years ago because of logging. And they're polluted and logging and people. Yeah, but now those rivers are doing a lot better

and there's almost no mussels in them. So the indigenous communities of Northern Michigan are trying to bring the whitefish back to the rivers in that area. And if that works, if the whitefish thrive in the river, if the baby whitefish thrive in those rivers, then maybe we can replicate that elsewhere over here as well, again, to help those fish, those very important fish get over this tremendous ecosystem change.

I have to admit, this is going to just show you how sort of silly I am sometimes. When I first, when we first talked about doing this, I heard the story and I was like, oh, wow, it's amazing. Why don't they just send like front end loaders to go in and dig them out? I know that's incredibly simplistic and probably a little dumb, but what prevents us from just going and getting them and getting them out of there? Yeah. So one of the challenges is the depth. They like these deep waters. And so for a human working at those depths, it's always a challenge. But one of the things that is tried is something called a benthic muscle masher. So a giant masher that's just scraping over the bottom of the lake, because honestly, the lakes are now monocultures of mussels.

There's nothing else down there. So there has been some experimental attempts to see what happens if we just kind of scrape these guys off the bottom. But there was a time when people thought we can't really do anything about this. And it's only recently that there's kind of been the will there to make a change here to save our native fishes. And I mean, not to pat yourselves too heavily on the back, but what is the importance of getting word out there and doing a film like yours to make sure that people actually understand what's at risk, what's happening,

and that we are still in dire need of a solution? Well, when we first learned about this happening about 10 years ago, the technology simply wasn't available to show people what was going on in a way to make them care. Right. So we just were able to use this latest available technology for filming underwater and show people those endless expanses of mussels. And I think what we want is just people to think a little bit more about the people who use the fish of the Great Lakes and the fish that a lot of people eat and have a cultural relationship to. And just the wonder that is in the Great Lakes that we sort of look out at

and we think a lot about the oceans and the whales and the sharks. But what we really wanted to do is get a few images where the Great Lakes looked like reefs in the ocean. Yeah, for a long time, we've only been able to imagine what's going on under the waves. But with this film and this technology, we're able to see it. We're able to really connect with it and spend time in underwater environments in a way that we haven't been able to before. So while we can see these really degraded environments, we can also see these really amazing environments and see what's at stake if we do nothing.

It is so cool. It does make me wonder, now that we have this technology, where are you going to look next? Well, one of the coolest places that we found working on this show were the underwater mountains of the Great Lakes. So you hear a lot about sea mounts in the oceans, right? Yeah. Well, there are the same kind of things out there in the Great Lakes. These are areas that are almost oases of biodiversity and oases of natural

abundance. And so the end of our show, we actually go to one of these and that's where a lot of life is thriving. But there are several of these really cool underwater mountains and we want to do some more exploring of these sort of offshore mountain ecosystems. That sounds cool underwater mountains, and we want to do some more exploring of these sort of offshore mountain ecosystems. That sounds amazing. Of course, we want to find more shipwrecks, too. Well, there's that, too. I just want to sort of wrap things up, and I want to hear from both of you on this, that

there is an equal amount of wonder and amazing things in this, and a little bit terrifying of things that are happening. When you do a project like this, it can feel like you're almost snowed under with both of those. What is it out of this project that gives you the most hope? Well, I think if folks watch the series, you'll see that episode three is called Silver Lining. And in any invasive species invasion, there's going to be losers, but of course, there's also going to be winners. So the lakes might now be more like they were just after the glaciers, these low nutrient environments. And there are a bunch of fishes

that are no longer in our lakes because we kind of overfished them and didn't do so great there. But now might be the time that we can bring those fishes back that belong here. Our native fish seem to be a little more resilient than non-native fish and kind of reboot the ecosystem to what it was like, you know, thousands of years ago. What about you, Zach? Well, for me, the real thrill was being able to get down inside a multi-species school of fish and just be with them for a couple of hours and just watch them. And to be able to see that sort of wonder that's unfolding out there, you know, 35 million people live around the Great Lakes, but we have no idea that there's this like ocean-like ecosystem going on out there. And to be able to capture that even just for a

minute, I think was the real thrill for me. And I knew when we were able to do that, that audiences are going to, I hope, connect with it like we were able to when we were out there filming. Well, having seen some of this, I almost guarantee you they will. Thank you for the work and thank you for making the time to come in and talk to us about it today. It's been great. Our pleasure. Thank you. Zach Melnick and Yvonne Drebert's new film is called All Too Clear.

You can stream the three-part series on TVO.org starting on Friday. If you're in Ontario, the series premieres this Saturday at 7 p-part series on TVO.org starting on Friday. If you're in Ontario, the series premieres this Saturday at 7 p.m. on TVO. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.