DON GONYEA, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Don Gonyea. This time of year, millions of people head to the Great Lakes to swim and fish or sail or just relax on the beach. But it's easy to forget just how extraordinary these lakes are. They stretch so far you can't even see the opposite shore. And underneath that water is a world most of us never see - old shipwrecks, ancient species of fish and ecosystems scientists are still trying to understand. A new podcast from Michigan Public explores these hidden stories. It's called Beyond the Shore. Rebecca Williams is the host, and she's here with me now. Rebecca, welcome.
REBECCA WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Thanks so much.
GONYEA: For people who've never been to the Great Lakes, what's the first thing that you find surprises them?
WILLIAMS: Most of the time when people see the lakes for the first time, they say something like, whoa, I did not know that the lakes were so huge. They say that looks like the ocean. The lakes take a while to warm up in the summertime, and so the best time to swim is usually later, in mid-August or in the fall. But that doesn't stop a lot of people, especially kids, from jumping in just, you know, as soon as it's springtime, and they can get in the water. But, you know, these lakes are enormous, and they're beautiful. And they're so important culturally and economically, and for, of course, fish and wildlife and for drinking water for those of us who live in the region.
GONYEA: So one thing I love about the podcast is you make it clear that every Great Lake has its own personality. One episode takes us to a place called Shipwreck Alley in Lake Huron - sounds like it earned its name the hard way, perhaps. Tell us about it.
WILLIAMS: It did, for sure. So we wanted to tell one story for each of the five Great Lakes, a sort of behind-the-scenes look at the lakes and what makes each one of them unique. For Lake Huron, we have the very first freshwater marine sanctuary that was ever designated in the U.S., and it's called the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And it's full of shipwrecks. There's about a hundred that underwater archaeologists have identified. And the experts think there are probably about another 100 that are yet to be discovered.
GONYEA: And why are these shipwrecks hidden under the water - why are they still in such remarkable condition?
WILLIAMS: Well, we found out that actually, it's the quality of the Great Lakes. They're especially good at preserving shipwrecks because of the cold, fresh, deep water.
GONYEA: Fresh water not salt water...
WILLIAMS: Right.
GONYEA: ...Is important.
WILLIAMS: Exactly. And it turns out it's crucial for why these are so well preserved. Sophie Stuart with the sanctuary told us that there are microorganisms and creatures like teredo worms in the ocean that eat wood. And so that means that the shipwrecks that are in warm, salty water deteriorate a lot faster.
SOPHIE STUART: We get shipwrecks off the Atlantic coast where all that's left is the iron fastenings or cannons or cannonballs or things like that because all of the wood has literally been eaten away. Whereas here, those microorganisms and creatures can't survive in cold, fresh water.
WILLIAMS: So that means that scuba divers, I guess, from around the world - we were told - love coming to the Great Lakes because of how well our shipwrecks are preserved.
GONYEA: One thing that comes through in this podcast is how much the Great Lakes have been shaped by people, for better and for worse. I grew up on Lake Erie, which, sadly, when I was a kid, those beaches were labeled unsafe for swimming. It's been cleaned up. It's a much different situation now. But what struck you the most about our impact and, I guess, our ongoing impact on these lakes?
WILLIAMS: Yeah. I mean, I think it's exactly what you just said, Don. It's the - we've made so many big changes to the lakes as humans over time. And unfortunately, a lot of those are for the worse, but there also are a lot of efforts to restore the lakes. And we have a couple of examples of that in the podcast. In our Lake Erie episode, we bring you the story of this dinosaur-like fish, the lake sturgeon. This is a really incredible fish. It can live more than a hundred years old, and they were nearly wiped out from the Great Lakes.
GONYEA: And this looks like a giant prehistoric fish.
WILLIAMS: Oh, yeah. I mean, it has like - it actually has armor on it.
GONYEA: Right. And ridges and all that.
WILLIAMS: Yeah.
GONYEA: But I digress. Continue. Yeah.
WILLIAMS: (Laughter) But so they were nearly eliminated from the lakes, and now people are doing painstaking work to bring them back.
GONYEA: And your final episode takes us to a lake that maybe people in the Midwest kind of forget about a little bit - Lake Ontario - 'cause it's up there to the northeast. What did you learn about that place that people will be surprised by?
WILLIAMS: Well, I learned that it has American eels in the lake. I don't know if a lot of people know that. They have this incredible life story. And they travel - when they're ready to reproduce, they travel to the Sargasso Sea, which is in the North Atlantic. And they mate, and then their babies swim all the way back up to Lake Ontario. So that's something that maybe a lot of people are not aware of.
But we did find out - our reporters Kate Furby and Jodi Westrick took a road trip. They traveled 500 miles of the eels' migration journey, which is a total of about 3,000 miles. And they found out that these eels are struggling to survive as a population, and hydroelectric dams are a big reason for that.
GONYEA: They have to swim through areas where dams are just stopping the flow.
WILLIAMS: Yeah.
GONYEA: And they have to encounter the technology of the dam. Is that turbines and all that?
WILLIAMS: That's right. And in the episode, Kate interviewed Mary Ann Perron. She's an aquatic ecologist at the St. Lawrence River Institute. And she asked her, what does it take for an eel to make it through the turbine of a dam?
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MARY ANN PERRON: Look, if you think of a propeller that's, you know - that's going extremely fast, they just need to sort of be in that opening at the right time.
WILLIAMS: So there is alternative technology - fish-safe turbines that are more of a scoop than a blade. And one of the companies that operates one major dam said it's part of a feasibility study looking at turbine design to help eels migrate downstream. The other company declined to comment.
GONYEA: So after spending so much time reporting this series, what do you see differently now when you stand on the shore of one of these Great Lakes?
WILLIAMS: I think just that there's so much mystery left, right? And I've lived in this region for decades. I've been an environment reporter for a long time here. I didn't know there were eels in Lake Ontario, right? I didn't actually know that much about the restoration of the sturgeon. So I think that's one of the things that has really stood out to me is that even when you live around here, there's just - there's so much left to learn.
GONYEA: We've been talking to Rebecca Williams, host of Michigan Public's new podcast about the Great Lakes. It is called Beyond the Shore. Listen wherever you find your podcasts. Rebecca, thank you.
WILLIAMS: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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