- [Anna] Coming up on "Great Lakes Now."

- [Marty] The whole philosophy behind the streamside rearing facility was to protect the fish.

- [Anna] A homegrown method of restoring a threatened Great Lakes fish species.

- [Marty] Even a small amount of sturgeon that may be put back into a river could make a huge difference.

- [Anna] And a new documentary highlights the problem of microplastics in the Great Lakes.

- [Sherri] Every place we look, we end up finding microplastics.

That's the reality that we're living in.

(gentle bright music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by: The Fred & Barbara Erb Family Foundation.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS.

Polk Family Fund.

DTE Foundation.

And contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hi, I'm Anna Sysling.

Welcome to "Great Lakes Now."

Streamside hatcheries are currently the main method for restoring lake sturgeon populations in the Great Lakes, with 14 facilities now operating across the basin.

It's a homegrown invention.

Streamside hatcheries were developed to save a specific population of lake sturgeon in a tributary of Lake Michigan.

- [Narrator] This is the Big Manistee River.

Lake sturgeon have spawned here for thousands of years.

They're the largest fish species in the Great Lakes, and the oldest sturgeon can live 150 years.

To the little Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the sturgeon that spawned in the Big Manistee River are ancestors.

And in the early 2000s, those ancestors were disappearing.

So the tribe took action.

Marty Holtgren was one of two recent college grads hired by the tribe to help restore the Big Manistee River sturgeon population.

- Now, there were only believed to be around 20 to 60 fish that would come up each year to spawn, and that number was staggeringly low.

- [Narrator] But practices employed on state and federal restoration projects violated many of the tribe's traditional beliefs.

Marty and his team needed a new approach that would take their values into account.

- As we're looking at some of those issues of common hatchery practice and thinking, "Are there ways to do it different?"

And looking at how the tribe viewed these sturgeon as ancestors, they're also in the land that they belong in and they're surrounded by people that they have, you know, spent decades, if not, centuries, if not, millennia with.

So it's a way to be very respectful of their place in the Great Lakes and keeping them local.

- [[Narrator] For starters, the tribe felt a kinship with the sturgeon of the Big Manistee River specifically, and they wanted more sturgeon who would call that river home.

So they were unwilling to stock lake sturgeon from another watershed.

- Many fish, such as sturgeon, they imprint to water.

So, they come back to those very locations that they were spawned at.

If you do traditional stocking practices and you take fish that were reared in a hatchery system and you put them into a river system, where are they gonna go, and are they going to come back to the river that you intend them to come back to?

Eggs would be reared in a location that was potentially hundreds of miles away and with a different water source, and that did not, or we believe would not perpetuate imprinting, which is so important.

- [Narrator] lake sturgeon are so loyal to their home streams that if a dam or another structure limits their access, they may not spawn at all.

- So if fish don't have access to a historic spawning ground, there's really a few scenarios that can play out.

And one is that those fish would actually reabsorb their eggs and not spawn at all.

Another is they would still lay eggs there and the survival would be low, or the other is that they may leave that system.

- [Narrator] So to restore sturgeon according to the tribe's values, the Little River Band's team faced some challenges.

First, they needed to catch sturgeon in the Big Manistee River without using set lines, ropes rigged with large hooks placed on the river bottom.

They'd need to use gentler methods.

Second, they would need to get fertilized eggs from those sturgeon without using aggressive handling techniques that were the norm.

- The common practice at the time captured female and forcibly try to extrude the eggs out.

There is high stress that's induced during that time, so trying to come up with practices that you don't have to put those types of stressors on the lake sturgeon.

Working for a tribe allowed me the latitude, right, to think in ways that were different.

And the tribe really pushed us to thinking, "Is there a better way to do this?"

- [Narrator] Third, they wanted to avoid using artificial fertilization techniques.

- It's typical to go out and you'll collect the eggs, and then you also collect the milter, the sperm from the fish, and then you try to to mix those in having one female and multiple males.

So we've looked at the issue of genetic diversity, and we found that it's very diverse when collected from the wild.

Letting the males and females select who they're going to spawn with instead of biologists seem to be a way that could maximize genetic effectiveness.

- [Narrator] The team got to work.

The first step was figuring out where the fish actually spawned.

- [Marty] It was exciting because community members from the tribe were telling me that they had observed fish spawning.

We also had the assistance of divers.

They have actually observed and documented the deposition of eggs in certain sites within the river.

- [Narrator] In the Big Manistee River, sturgeon typically spawn starting in May, but only about 1% of hatchlings live more than a few months.

If the team could protect the hatchlings during those first critical months, that could boost the survival rate significantly.

But how?

That's where the team got really inventive and created the first streamside hatchery.

- [Marty] The whole philosophy behind the streamside rearing facility was to protect the fish till they were about six to eight inches long.

When they're that large, the survival, it increases dramatically.

So even a small amount of sturgeon that may be put back into a river could make a huge difference because the survival is that much greater.

- [Narrator] And the water in the streamside hatchery would come from the Big Manistee, pumped from the river, through the fish tanks, and back to the river, enabling them to imprint on the river so they could return to spawn.

To try the system out, they just needed to collect some eggs.

And Michael LaHaye, a researcher in Canada, had pioneered a clever way to collect some.

- We would use a furnace filter.

Yes, it is the same type of filter you would put on your furnace.

You would wrap that filter around a brick and lower that brick down onto a suspected spawning site.

The reason we could capture lake sturgeon eggs is once they exit the body, they start to become adhesive.

And then the first thing that they touch, they'll stick to.

You'd open up the furnace filter, you'd see lake sturgeon eggs that had adhered to the filter, and you'd have to very carefully pick each of those eggs off.

- [Narrator] The research team also discovered a window of opportunity for catching hatchlings around midnight.

- They're basically underneath the gravel when they hatch.

And then as they start maturing a little bit, they start coming out of the gravel.

At that point, they're only about an inch and a half long.

Once they come out of the gravel at night, they start slowly drifting downstream.

We found that the majority of the time that they would drift from around 10:00 PM to 1:00 AM.

It was a protection strategy where they're not as susceptible to predation.

- [Narrator] These days, beginning in mid-May, researchers head to the river at dusk each night, hauling truckloads of gear with them.

Corey Jerome is a research biologist.

He manages the Little River Band's Nme streamside facility.

- Every night we have four to six people, depending on how many fish we're seeing.

We'll put out four to eight cone-shaped nets that are about three-foot wide, two-foot tall.

And in the end of that, we have a collection bucket that collects everything that's moving down the river.

And then every hour, we'll empty that bucket out into another one and bring it back to our table to sort through what's been collected.

- [Narrator] The researchers spend hours each night carefully sorting through all of the debris, looking for larval sturgeon.

- [Corey] We got a lot of nights with zeros, and then some nights with fish.

Our best night, we've had seven and 800.

But generally, an average night might be 100 to a couple hundred fish.

- [Narrator] Whether they catch hundreds of fish or just one, Corey transports the tiny sturgeon back to the tribe's streamside rearing facility.

- [Corey] We try to clean out any more debris that we didn't get fully out while we were collecting them, and then they go into their tanks and fad for the night and we feed any other fish that were in the building.

- [Narrator] Most fish hatcheries have huge, complex filtering systems, but those systems could potentially remove the unique chemical cue that these fish needed for imprinting.

- Our water filtering is minimal, just trying to reduce sediments and one UV filter to try to reduce bacteria and viruses that might cause infections so that these fish will still know what the Manistee River is when we release them and they come back.

Some research shows that they should have greater than 80% survival as released fish from our streamside compared to from egg in the wild that's like 99% mortality to adulthoods.

(bright music) - [Narrator] By September, the fish are big enough to fend for themselves.

The Little River Band has been hosting public sturgeon release events for 21 years.

The fish are transported in tiny silver buckets.

- We fill those buckets right with our river water, and then put the fish kind of individually into those buckets and hand them to the families and kids and elders and let them walk 'em down to the river.

That aspect of taking care of the fish and taking them to the river and the hand release right into the water so that everyone has that connection.

Last year, we released 807.

- When I first started working for the tribe, not many people knew what a lake sturgeon was.

And now it's actually a common fish in Manistee where it's on people's minds.

- [Corey] One thing we're trying to work on is trying to limit the interaction with our spawning sturgeon, trying to limit any additional stress that these fish would be seeing while they're trying to spawn within the river.

We're working to kind of get this message out.

Observe don't disturb the sturgeon as they're spawning.

- One of the exciting pieces of working for the tribe, it was looking at the most appropriate way to do management, and not just management, but be a steward of that lake sturgeon.

And it was exciting using science, Western knowledge, indigenous knowledge, and putting all those pieces together and coming up with something that had never happened before.

And now it's just a feature of the lakes, that this is the way that we manage lake sturgeon in Lake Michigan.

(serene music) - If you've heard of the Great Pacific garbage patch, then you probably won't be surprised to hear that there's plastic pollution in the Great Lakes too.

For more on that, here's "Great Lakes Now" executive producer, Rob Green.

- Plastics are everywhere, and lately we're learning that tiny bits and shreds of plastics called microplastics are everywhere too.

One recent study suggests that we may each have about a plastic spoons worth of microplastics in our brains.

There's a documentary out right now about microplastics in the Great Lakes.

It's called "Ripples of Plastic," and I wanna play you some excerpts from it.

These are the filmmakers, Chris Langer and Josh Heese.

Both of them are from Ohio, and the film focuses on Lake Erie.

To learn about microplastics, they talk to Dr. Sherri Mason of Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania.

- [Sherri] Plastic ends up in the lake in a multitude of ways.

Scientific studies actually show that the vast majority of litter is unintentional littering.

It's people putting their garbage out at night and a raccoon goes through it and it scatters everywhere.

Or windstorm comes in and it blows over.

We've all had this experience, you walk down the side of the road and you see straws and cups and food wrappers.

When a storm event happens, all of that washes down the storm drains.

- [Jill] Storm drains, they don't go to a wastewater treatment facility to get processed.

They go directly into a nearby creek, river, or possibly even Lake Erie.

Any trash that's on the landscape will probably get filtered to the road, filtered to a storm drain, and then out in to the lake.

(water rushing) (birds chirping) - So, you know, this is Mill Creek, which runs through actually a lot of Erie, Pennsylvania and runs through a lot of residential areas.

Most of it is actually a buried river, but a lot of storm drains go into it.

So people don't see the water.

They don't realize that the storm drains are going directly into this creek.

And so it all ends up flowing down here before it makes its way to the lake.

(Sherri groans) So I'm gonna dump everything, and then we wanna do a quick sort here in the field.

Plant, you can throw away, and then the big plastic, maybe kind of put to the side.

That's what we're gonna take back to the lab.

I'll try not to get you wet.

(Sherri laughs) I think what's really intriguing about this study is that we're fortunate that we have a litter boom, but most rivers don't.

So normally everything you see here, this is what would be flowing out into the lakes.

All across the country, all across the world, you know, this is the stuff that you would find, and this is what fish are swimming in.

This is what frogs and other amphibians are, you know, trying to live amongst.

And then, you know, you kind of have people questioning whether or not this is gonna have an impact on an ecosystem.

If this was your house, I think it's pretty easy to say that it would be affecting you.

You know, all of this, this is just insane.

What's really interesting is that if you get down into all of this what seems to be organic debris, what you also notice is where all of this plastic starts.

You see nurdles.

These are pre-production plastics.

It's just enmeshed within all of this.

(gentle contemplative music) Small plastics arise from two ways.

They're either manufactured as small plastics.

Microbeads is one example, but pre-production plastic pellets, otherwise known as nurdles, are another great example.

The other way that we get microplastics is from big plastic items slowly breaking into smaller and smaller pieces.

- Okay, pause.

Now you know what a nurdle is and you know some of the ways that microplastics can get into the Great Lakes.

But how bad is the problem?

Well, this is Chelsea Rockman.

She's a professor at the University of Toronto now.

But earlier on in her career, she studied plastics in the ocean.

Take a look.

- [Chelsea] Starting out in the middle of the ocean, doing my work actually in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

You definitely found plastic in pretty much every sample.

And when it came to fish, maybe one in four and a couple pieces here and there, maybe sometimes even one in 10 fish.

But when you get out into the middle of the ocean, what you notice is that the majority of it is microplastic as far as the eye can see.

And I was interested in science to inform policy, and you can't clean that up.

And so realizing quickly that the research I wanted to do to inform policy should start where the plastic starts.

So I started working in freshwater streams and wastewater treatment plants and runoff systems from agriculture and other sites.

And then I came to Toronto and suddenly going on a boat in the middle of the lake, we weren't capturing fish with microplastic one out of every 10 or one out of every four fish.

Suddenly it was every single fish that we pulled up.

And not just a couple pieces, but sometimes hundreds of pieces.

The Great Lakes, I do think, have a serious plastic problem.

I've never worked in an area within North America where I've seen this much plastic pollution in the water.

- Every single fish.

Now, what does that mean for the fish or for us?

Here's Sherri Mason again.

- [Sherri] Microplastics, because they are so tiny, are very easily ingested by organisms.

And when they ingest that plastic, it's not just the plastic that they're ingesting, but all the chemicals that are in and on that plastic.

Plastic, when it's manufactured, is embedded with chemicals.

Things like plasticizers and colorants and UV stabilizers.

In addition, as plastic is out in the environment, other chemicals will adhere to it.

Growing up in the '70s, you know, I read "The Lorax."

Things are so dreary, they're almost as bad as up in Lake Erie.

The reason it had that kind of infamous quality is because the Great Lakes were used as industrial dumping grounds for decades.

Things like polychlorinated biphenyls that were used as industrial insulators.

Things like polyaromatic hydrocarbons that come out from power plants.

When there's plastic, the chemicals will adhere to the surface of those plastics.

So when this little piece of plastic then is ingested by an organism, it's not just taking in that plastic, it's taking in all of those chemicals.

And so each piece of plastic becomes like a little poison pill, transferring or moving those chemicals from the external environment into that organism.

Many of them are endocrine disruptors, so they mimic hormones.

And so they create changes in the organisms.

Maybe they don't swim as fast, maybe they have trouble breathing, maybe they're sex changes so that male fish become female fish.

And so therefore they can't propagate.

And they also become vectors to move those chemicals from the external environment into us.

So you go out and you go fishing, you catch that fish, you're gonna be then taking in the chemicals that that fish has taken in.

And so you have this bioaccumulation effect where some of these microplastics are so small that they can be ingested by planktonic organisms, the very base of the food chain.

And then you have a small fish that eats millions of plankton, and then you have a medium fish that eats hundreds of small fish, and then you have a large fish that eats tens of mediums fish, and then you have a human that eats that fish.

And all along those chains, you have this increase in the amount of these chemicals.

- Okay, so it's not just plastic bits, it's a big variety of plastic bits with a whole range of chemicals stuck to them.

What does each type of plastic and each chemical do to, say, a fish?

Let's go back to the team at the University of Toronto where they're trying to figure that out.

- And see their air bladders?

See those little bubbles kind of toward the top behind their head?

Here, we have fathead minnow.

They have been exposed to plastic without chemicals, plastic with chemicals, and then just the chemical itself.

We're measuring a variety of different effects over the 28 days that they're exposed.

Delays in development, deformities, saw some eye pigmentation issues and some fogginess in some of the eyes from the treatments, which is interesting.

We can take that information and say, "Okay, this type of plastic with this type of chemical causes these types of effects."

- So this big blue one that you can see here, this is one of the fragments that I picked out of the stomach.

So it just broke off probably from a larger plastic item And just as it's in the environment, smaller and smaller pieces can start breaking down.

So this is a really, really tiny fiber.

So that would be something that comes off your clothes.

We've been surprised by the kind of particles that we're finding.

We've found a lot of rubber particles, which is like kind of tire particles that can come off when you drive and they get washed into lakes.

And they're particularly harmful because they have a lot of added chemicals that can be toxic to fish.

And we've been finding hundreds of particles of tire rubber in some of the fish.

- [Jill] Study just came out in 2021, and it's showing that the chemicals associated with tire rubber are killing off salmon species.

This is the first study documenting microplastics killing off an organism.

- The good news is that while there are microplastics in fish, we probably don't need to freak out about eating fish because there are microplastics in pretty much all foods.

Wait, is that good news?

It doesn't sound good.

- We not only find microplastics in fish, but studies are coming out.

We find it in bottled water, we find it in tap water, we find it in beer, we find it in sea salt.

We find it in your fruits and vegetables that can actually make its way through the soil into plants.

And if it's making its way through the soil into plants, well, animals eat plants, not just humans, but beef and chickens and, you know, so it's making its way basically into every kind of form of food that we have, which means there's no doubt that it's making its way into us.

You know, a couple of studies have come out showing that it's in human feces.

Every place we look, we end up finding microplastics.

That's the reality that we're living in.

- Yeah, it's not great.

Microplastics are tiny, and they're everywhere.

Again, this much plastic could be in your brain.

So what do we do?

Well, here's what Sherri Mason thinks.

- To solve this problem, you start at the very beginning of its life.

That's where you focus the attention.

It's not at the cleanup, it's not at the end.

By then, it's too hard.

You can't filter all of the microplastics out of Lake Erie without killing Lake Erie because you're gonna be filtering out all of the microorganisms that are so critical at the very base of the food chain.

So if you wanna solve this problem, you start at the very front end.

So you start by limiting our use of fossil fuels.

You start by limiting the production of plastic pellets that go into plastic products.

And the way that you do that, aside from legislation that affects those communities, but you can do it on an individual level by not buying plastic.

Because, ultimately, any corporation will tell you, "We're just doing what people demand."

"We're just giving you what you want."

So if you don't want it, don't buy it.

- It's pretty hard to argue with that logic, but it's also pretty hard to avoid plastics.

They are everywhere after all.

But let me try and leave you on an up note.

If you can't quite go 100% plastics-free, you might be able to keep your microplastics out of the Great Lakes by installing a filter on your washing machines outlet hose.

Or you could help by participating in a beach cleanup.

And right here in our region at the University of Michigan, researchers are trying to develop a better microplastics filter that uses adhesives made from discarded diapers.

You can learn all about it at greatlakesnow.org.

(gentle serene music) - Thanks for watching.

For more about any of the stories in this show, visit greatlakesnow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the lakes.

(gentle serene music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by: The Fred & Barbara Erb Family Foundation.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS.

Polk Family Fund.

DTE Foundation.

And contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle bright music)