Documentary tells stark tale of invasion of countless mussels

 

A full house at the Rogers Theater learned how the quagga mussels have become a threat to the Great Lakes’ fishery. The husband and wife filmmakers Zach Melnich and Yvonne Drebert spent more than 150 hours filming underwater to explore how countless mussels have changed the habitat for fish. The film “Great Lakes, All Too Clear,” was part of the opening night of the Thunder Bay International Film Festival that screened more than 50 films about the Great Lakes and waters around the world at various locations in northeast Michigan. 

The team used a cutting-edge remote operated submergible camera to capture stunning video to illustrate the situation that has been building on the Great Lakes over the past decade. The Canadian filmmakers explained their process before showing the film. 

“Where we live it is actually hard to buy whitefish these days. Whitefish are an important species commercially and also very important to our indigenous friends. We started doing research into it and a lot of arrows pointed back to these little invasive mussels called quagga mussels,” Drebert explained. 

“We really wanted to tell this story about the whitefish and the quaggas. But how are we going to do this? This is something going on way out in the middle of the lake, hundreds of feet down,” Melnich said. 

The couple took advantage of a huge leap in underwater technology that transformed how images and video can be captured in the Great Lakes. 

“We embraced that technology and spent a whole lot of days under there, trying to show people what is going on. But we wouldn’t be able to do that without the people who know the lakes and the fish,” Melnich said. 

The film showed the effects the mussels have had in changing the food chain and research that is being done to combat the problem. Some scientists have tried approaches varying from mashing the mussels on the floor of the lakes to hand-picking the shells off the lake floor around harbors in Lake Superior. All methods are in the early stages of development to battle a huge number of the invasive quagga. 

“One thing that is really hard to think about, but needs to be in our minds is how many of these there are. We heard the number quadrillions. Unless you are (famous British theoretical physicist the late) Stephen Hawking, that means absolutely nothing. So, I came up with another way to think about it. In the waters of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, from about Grand Rapids to about where we are now, imagine in your head 18,511 fully-loaded 110 car-long freight trains. That would be the weight of quagga mussels in that part of the lake,” Melnich said to illustrate the vastness of the situation. 

It is theorized the invasive mussels were introduced in the Great Lakes from the ocean-going vessels that pass through the waters. The solution is still not evident, but the presenters made some suggestions. 

“We are going to have to vote with our money. To solve this problem, we need the 60 million or so people who live in this basin to say this matters. This matters a lot,” said Jason Smith, a fisheries’ biologist for the Bay Mills Indian Community. Smith was interviewed for the film and took questions with the filmmakers after the showing. 

Kae Skubik, a Great Lakes’ fisheries’ biologist said the whitefish population in Little Traverse Bay has been steadily declining since 2019.

“Unfortunately, we catch fewer and fewer fish in Little Traverse Bay every year. And the average age of our fish goes up by one every year. We are not seeing more whitefish recruiting to this population. Every year they get one year older and one year closer to not having any whitefish in Little Traverse Bay,” Skubik said. 

As for other uses for the mussel, Drebert said they could not find any. 

“They are also an issue in Europe and they are making their way westward across Canada and the United States. So, they are making their way to lakes everywhere. We have yet to find anyone finding anyone doing anything economically (with the quagga mussels) through our travels,” Drebert said.

Melnich thanked the audience for its attention and thoughtful questions and summed up the evening. 

“I think overall, if we get people to appreciate a little bit more the magic that is in our own backyard, that is the Great Lakes, so that when we think about underwater, we don’t always think about the ocean, and sometimes we think about the Great Lakes. If we did that, we are 

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