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

A velvet rope for fish swimming upstream.

- The reality is we need to sort 'em.

We need to determine whether they're invasive or not, whether they're even a desired species or not.

- [Narrator] Harvesting manoomin, our region's native wild rice.

- The rice is still here.

It persisted, it survived.

- [Narrator] And a runaway buoy advances Great Lakes science.

- It just perfectly got into exactly the situation we wanted to get into.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by The Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, The Charles Stuart 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 music) - Hi, welcome to "Great Lakes Now."

I'm Rob Green.

In the fall of 2020, "Great Lakes Now" took you to Traverse City, Michigan, where three aging dams had been removed from the Boardman/Ottaway River, a tributary of Lake Michigan.

Here's what Traverse City Director of Public Services Frank Dituri told us at the time.

- There is no greater ecological bang for your buck than removing a dam, because what it does to the ecological environmental systems by segmenting a river system, keeping populations apart, warming the water on the backside of the dam, stopping the movement of nutrients both directions, up and downstream - [Rob] The goal was to restore the river to its original form and reconnect it to Lake Michigan.

The first dam came down in 2012, and by 2020, the former reservoir was returning to a more natural state.

- Once you remove the dam, you have all this organic material, organic soils with a seed bed that's been sitting there for 100 years or so.

And then you add sunlight to it, that energy and the organic materials and the sand, it's like this ecological explosion that you're seeing.

It's absolutely amazing!

- [Rob] After the dam removal, researchers saw an increase in the number of native brook trout, and that's a good sign.

- When you see brook trout in your stream, you know you probably have the best ecological conditions for fish.

- But when we did our story in 2020, fish still couldn't move between the river and the lake.

They were still separated by the Union Street Dam in downtown Traverse City.

The plan at the time was to replace that dam with a state-of-the-art research facility called FishPass.

The project was supposed to break ground in the fall of 2020, but a lawsuit got in the way.

Dan Zielinski, a scientist with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, is the principal engineer on the FishPass project.

- Going through the court system took time.

But thankfully, we were able to come out with a decision that was in favor of FishPass.

- [Rob] The project finally broke ground in 2024.

The goal?

Create a barrier that allows some fish upstream but keeps other fish out of the river.

Brett Fessel, a research biologist with the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, has been working on the FishPass project since its inception nearly 20 years ago.

- We set out with this goal initially, was to create a system or a facility that would allow species to pass through it under their own volition, as if it weren't there.

Sounds good, but the reality is we need to sort 'em.

We need to determine whether they're invasive or not, whether they're even a desired species or not.

- [Rob] The FishPass engineers had to figure out how to sort fish in a river, and to do that, they looked to another industry that sorts through a different kind of stream, recycling.

- When I got brought on, that was one of the things I dived really deeply into, is understanding how the material recycling industry got up to speed from the 1970s to where it is today.

- [Rob] Material recycling typically begins by separating objects by size.

- Sorting based on size to start with is really intuitive because trying to sort a six-foot-long sturgeon and a whole mess of six-inch-long perch can be a challenge.

Sorting by size is as simple as it's grates, it's screens that sort fish based on body depth or their width.

- [Rob] After size, recycling materials are separated by their physical attributes.

To sort fish, the FishPass researchers started by identifying all the species likely to use the river, and what each one likes and dislikes.

Some parts of FishPass will resemble an obstacle course, where fish sort themselves according to what attracts or repels them.

- A perfect example is hearing sensitivity.

A lot of fish that are really good, really good hearing systems, and those are, like, your carps and cyprinids versus, like, salmonids.

They're more or less tone deaf.

A bubble curtain is a perforated pipe on the bottom of the channel, and you just put pressurized air in there, and it rises.

You can actually play music or sound into it and create, like, a wall of sound.

And as fish, you know, move in, it becomes a really sharp gradient of noise and different conditions that can cause fish to want to not want to cross it, so they'll swim along it or just avoid it.

Other things are like strobe lights or just lighting.

Fish that certainly like to move at night are gonna avoid well-lit areas, but you might have other fish that are attracted to light.

- [Rob] Invasive sea lamprey aren't the strongest swimmers, so one way to keep them from moving upstream is to speed up the water flowing downstream.

That works even better if you keep them from using their sucker-like mouths to attach to surfaces, something lamprey do to help them fight against strong currents.

- You could place grids along the surface in one of those channels that prevents sea lamprey from attaching because one of the ways that they're able to swim up high speed flow is they attach to the surface, release, swim forward, attach, rest.

And if they can't attach, they can't swim those high speeds, so other fish that have no problem swimming at that speed can move through, and a sea lamprey wouldn't.

- [Rob] Image-recognition technology will also be used to identify species as they move through the fish channels.

- Technologies like image recognition, that is pretty much a camera taking a video or a photo of a fish and being able to use computer learning to identify, well, yes, this is a desirable fish, this is undesirable, or we don't know.

And that can just trigger a door opening or a gate sliding that allows that continual passage, or closing it in a trap.

A lot of these tools can be used to eventually reach an upstream assortment of fish that are all fish that are desirable while you're blocking or removing the fish that are undesirable.

- [Rob] And that raises an important question: what makes a fish desirable or undesirable?

- The ultimate question of what is desirable and what is undesirable with this river for passage is ultimately a decision for the DNR in consultation with the tribe and the public.

- [Rob] As a partner on the FishPass project, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians was particularly concerned that native species got a free pass.

- As far as what species the tribe would really support bringing back, all species native to the Great Lakes basin would be supported for passage.

Lake sturgeon, whitefish, lake trout, white sucker, longnose sucker.

These communities of fish, they don't operate independent from each other, so in order to sort of restart an intact system, if you can as much as possible bring community in, the better the chance.

- [Rob] Jason Slade, vice president for strategic initiatives at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, works with scientists from around the world, and many are already lining up to participate with FishPass.

- There's not many places that you can go in the whole Great Lakes basin and analyze the fish that are native to our region and also the invasive species that we're trying to keep out.

With FishPass, we're able to take that technology and hopefully develop it and share it.

The goal would be to develop specific solutions that then can be applied throughout the entire basin or really, throughout the U.S.

- [Rob] By mid-summer of 2025, the project reached a major milestone when water began to flow over the new spillway.

- That was a really special moment 'cause the water was no longer being diverted underneath a culvert that was disappearing underground.

It was daylit, and essentially it will never go underground again at this site.

- Now, with the dam gone, you can see it, you can feel it, you can smell it, and be there and experience the river in its original, native form.

The underlying goal of the Bordman-Ottaway restoration project has always been not just another river restoration project, but a restoration of community.

And what we've meant by that and still hold true to it is that relationship of people with the river.

We all benefit from healthy rivers, reconnected rivers, and so the underpinning reason for the tribe becoming involved is to essentially try and undo some of the wrongs that have done to rivers in the region, and in the Anishinaabe homeland.

(soft music) - A native grain has been central to the culture of our region for centuries, and although it's disappeared from some places where it used to thrive, in other locations, it's coming back.

Bridge Detroit Environment reporter Jena Brooker brings us the story.

- [Jena] Manoomin is the Anishinabe name for the Great Lakes region's native wild rice, and it's a vital part of Anishinabe culture.

- I didn't know any of this, or I didn't have any of these feelings about rice until I got to come out and rice and realize like, oh my god, this is why I exist!

- [Jena] That's Eryn Hyma of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians.

She's on Michigan's Au Sable River, harvesting manoomin.

- This is what allowed my ancestors and my family to thrive and sustain themselves.

Just really special, and I want more people to understand that story.

- [Jena] Wild rice beds used to grow all over the state, including on the banks of the Detroit River and on islands in that river, like Belle Isle, which is now a state park.

But wild rice is an uncommon site these days.

Antonio Cosme is a co-founder of the non-profit Black to the Land Coalition.

- When Antoine De Mothe Cadillac came to Detroit, he described it as an earthly paradise.

The northern section of Belle Isle was more of a marsh, and there was coastal wetlands where all these rivers exited Detroit.

And wetlands is truly the place where wild rice thrives and grows.

- [Jena] After Europeans arrived and cities rose up along the river's banks, the manoomin went away.

The same can be said for many urban rivers around the Great Lakes.

- The history of draining wetlands and clearing swamps is the history of displacing wild rice in a lot of ways.

- [Jena] But where rivers are allowed to exist in a more natural state, manoomin can still be found.

he Au Sable River runs across the northern part of Michigan's lower peninsula before flowing into Lake Huron.

In September of 2025, a couple dozen Anishinaabek people with indigenous roots from around the Great Lakes gathered on the Au Sable to harvest manoomin the traditional way.

Wyatt Szpliet is the Food Sovereignty Coordinator with the Gun Lake Band of Pottawatomi Indians.

- These are knockers.

This is cedar wood.

And the reason we use cedar wood is because it's lightweight, it floats, and it's soft.

You don't hurt the plants when you're knocking them.

- Little grab.

- The central part of any Anishinaabek's life would have been his wiigwaasi-jimaan, which means birchbark canoe.

And for us, that would have been like our car.

We lived on waterways, we used the waterways for transportation.

You couldn't hunt, fish, gather without your canoe.

So first and foremost, there's gonna be at least two of you in each canoe, alright?

There's gonna be a push-puller and there's gonna be a rice knocker.

You guys can switch throughout.

You can hand off your equipment to each other.

This is how we get through the manoomin without damaging it.

It gathers all of them up, and they're strung together.

- This is really light.

- Yeah, careful with the end of it, though.

You don't wanna bop nobody.

We're not just harvesting, guys.

We are actually helping this bed out, because if we didn't come out here and do this, ducks, redwing blackbirds, they love this just as much as we do, guys.

So what we're doing today, we're not just taking it away from nature, we're helping nature, because this gives us a chance to get those seeds into the sediment and actually get that sediment moved a little bit with our push-pull so that those seeds get a chance to bury and actually get covered up instead of just being a buffet for the geese the next time they just follow our footprint through the manoomin bed.

- [Jena] The Au Sable, famous for trout fishing, saw hydroelectric dams installed on the river over the past century.

That helped lead to the demise of the manoomin.

But on this part of the Au Sable, manoomin is back.

Frank Sprague is a Tribal Elder and Wild Rice Mentor in the Gun Lake Band of Pottawatomi.

- 90 years ago, they put a dam just upstream from here.

Over the course of time, the dam started to break down.

They didn't wanna take care of it.

Army Corps engineers come in.

Long story short, they took it out.

For 90 years, all this rice and this muck and all this stuff stayed dormant behind that dam.

And once they released that dam, all that sediment come down and settled all through here.

- Now, the ricers are watching for other dam removals that could revive more manoomin beds.

When you're here for a full weekend, how many pounds of rice do you end up with?

- Eh, we've gotten, you know, for four days, we could, you know, end up with, you know, anywhere from 600 to 1200 pounds.

- [Jena] Just with, like, maybe 20 people out there?

- Yeah.

- Wow.

- [Frank] Yep.

- [Jena] Into the sacks, the seeds of the zizania genus, first classified by western science in the 1700s, found throughout the Great Lakes.

But it needs to be processed before it's ready to store.

I'm here to see how that's done.

My teachers?

Antonio Cosme and Jared Ten Brink, who is a member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi.

First step, dry the rice in the sun.

- For the Anishinaabe peoples, it made a massive amount of our caloric intake over the winter.

So we needed it to last.

And so we needed to dry it so that it would make it through the winter.

- So, how long would you let this rest out for?

- I think generally, it's a couple of days.

- Yeah, it's a couple of days if you have good sunlight and heat.

A couple of days.

- [Jared] There's so many steps involved, that there is a job for everyone.

- [Jena] The next step: parching.

More drying, this time by fire.

- Historically, we would have done this exactly the same way.

We would have built a fire and set copper kettle over a flame and then stirred and stirred and stirred.

You don't want it to get too hot, so we have the flame off to the side so the top part is hot and the bottom part stays cooler so that it doesn't cook the rice.

You're just kind of toasting it in a way.

- [Jena] After parching, it's time to remove the hulls from the rice.

The old-fashioned way is jigging, rolling the grain underfoot.

But it's easier to use a hulling machine.

- [Jared] So this threshes it, it tosses that grain around.

- Does wild rice taste different than regular rice that we're used to buying at the grocery store?

- The first thing that I think is important to know is that there's different wild rices.

This wild rice is more of a nutty flavor.

This is different than what you can buy typically in a store.

- What's your favorite thing to make with the rice?

Back at rice camp, Sam Barber's making dinner.

- [Sam] This was cooked for probably about 45 minutes.

- [Jena] Seems like it's really popular, serving that with maple syrup and-- - Yeah, maple syrup and berries, that's a pretty traditional, I think that's a pretty traditional way.

I like fitting it into dishes, and it just goes so well with so many different ingredients.

Like, you could put it in chili, you could put it in, you know, Middle Eastern dishes, you could put it in Asian dishes, either mixed in or as, like, a main starch.

And tacos with wild rice are really good, too.

- [Jena] Soup is popular, too, like at the Detroit North American Indian Center.

- Some of our foundational stuff, though, that we do is earth honoring.

- [Jena] This is the third annual manoomin soup cook-off.

The judges record their scores, with Jesse Deer-In-Water presiding.

- Is first place with 23.5.

(crowd cheers) - [Jena] The soups are served.

- Butternut squash manoomin soup, and then I've got toppings for dried venison, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and dried cranberries.

- [Diner] Thank you.

- Some of the recipes are, like, family recipes that folks have in their families that they've had for a while.

Other ones are just, like, general recipes that people know about because they're common soups throughout the Great Lakes.

And taking the concepts of, like, modern chef-ing, you know, you might say, and mixing it with the old recipes and the old foods.

- Oh it's amazing.

Yeah, so delicious.

- [Jena] Here, there's concern about water quality.

Preserving the environment is a theme of this gathering.

Sam Cooper came all the way from Petoskey, near the northern tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

- So there's a big connection between people that consider themselves to be water protectors and people that are trying to help support manoomin and wild rice and help it flourish in Michigan.

- The Michigan Wild Rice Initiative brings experts and stakeholders together.

They've created the Manoomin Stewardship Guide.

Vincent Salgado is part of the initiative.

Are you working with the state to implement something as a result of the plan?

- Hopefully with this plan, we're able to get the state agencies more involved in this work to restore manoomin by providing more resources and, like, more boots on the ground, but also, we hope this starts a dialog for increasing protections for manoomin.

- [Jena] In 2023, the state officially designated manoomin Michigan's native grain.

Where might more of it be grown?

It needs slower-moving, shallow, clean water.

People nearby need to understand and accept it, too.

- That rice used to grow in the Grand River and in the Muskegon River.

It doesn't grow there anymore, but maybe we take a dam out and it comes back.

- You know, not everybody's gonna want it, you know, and that's fine.

It doesn't have to be over there.

But where it is, that it's protected and it should stay that way, especially, like, this is all natural.

You know, it just wants to be here.

- I look at places like Belle Isle.

That is a place where wild rice would've been and that's a place where we could have it now.

- [Jena] The conditions would need to be made right again, like up north on this part of the Au Sable.

- The rice is still here.

It persisted, it survived.

And we're still here, and we persisted and we survived.

And we're not going anywhere.

(slide whooshes) (gentle music) - Our next story takes us way out into the icy waters of Lake Michigan in the wintertime, and the main character is about the size of a basketball.

This is the Muskegon Spotter Buoy, and it went on an adventure that gave researchers a glimpse into how the lakes really behave in the winter.

The Muskegon Spotter Buoy was part of a network of buoys across the Great Lakes that capture data about water conditions.

Steve Ruberg is an observing system researcher with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, one of the organizations that deploys and manages these buoys.

- In response to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a buoy network was established to give freighter captains, the freighter fleet, the ability to look at wave conditions and wind conditions in real time.

That has now grown to many, many buoys that have been supported by an organization called the Great Lakes Observing System.

- This real-time data collection is especially valuable in the winter, when ice and high winds make the lakes particularly treacherous.

But there's a problem: those same harsh conditions can destroy buoys, which means that many of them are moored in the spring and taken out of the water before winter.

That's where spotter buoys come in.

They're smaller and much more durable than other buoys in the network.

Over the past few years, they've been one of the methods used to gather data about those harsh winter conditions.

- These small basketball-sized buoys that are very robust have been proven to be really successful at getting us winter wave observations.

Most of the time, they will stay on the mooring.

We've even put 'em, we've even dropped them from, like, a Coast Guard helicopter in January and then picked them up in the springtime, and they can survive that.

Once they come ashore, they get pounded by ice and waves and that sort of thing, but they can survive that.

- That brings us back to the Muskegon spotter buoy.

In January of 2025, it broke free from its mooring off the coast of Muskegon, Michigan.

That's not unusual and wasn't cause for concern.

Again, these things can take a beating.

But what was new was what that buoy observed.

This little buoy ended up in almost the middle of Lake Michigan, and drifted around before washing up on a Michigan shore in the spring.

During its travels, it observed a variety of different ice conditions.

- It just got into, perfectly got into, sort of exactly the situation we wanted to get into, which was smaller pieces of ice up to larger pieces of ice, which all of that affects the wave height.

And so that was really the serendipitous benefit of this in this situation.

It really accidentally kind of did exactly what we've been hoping to do with the more planned deployment.

- Ayumi Fujisake-Manome is an associate research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research.

According to her, the Muskegon Spotter Buoy captured data from a few interesting events.

- Where it was traveling, there was a couple of interesting storm event.

One happened in open water, and the other happened when the buoy was covered, partially covered, by ice.

And the first event was around February 7th, and buoy recorded high wave with a wave height as high as 15 feet.

And then later, there's another storm event that was around February 17th.

And for that one, a buoy was in 60% ice cover and recorded up to eight feet wave.

So those data are pretty tremendously valuable for us.

One, understanding winter wave conditions.

And then, two, how should we represent the process of ice dampening wave?

We have very, very limited knowledge on that process.

And any data from this buoy will help reveal that process and how we should represent that process in our model.

- [Adam] How ice dampens wave action on the lakes is just one of many things we know very little about.

The data gathered from this buoy's unscheduled adventure is already helping to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

- So one finding is that for this particular trajectory of drifting buoy, we found that the model we are using is dampening wave pretty more aggressively than it should be, when there is ice cover.

And this seems to be particularly true when ice is drifting, moving around.

- Of course, this is just the data from one buoy.

A lot more information is needed to better inform the models and forecasts.

- The accumulation of data is very important.

The data is starting to accumulate, which is a very good news for this research.

I'm hopeful that we'll see more accumulation of the data and that help us to understand the process and that will feed back to our prediction model.

(slide whooshes) (gentle music) - Thanks for watching.

You can find more about the stories in this show at GreatLakesNow.org.

While you're there, please follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter.

(bright music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by: The Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, The Charles Stuart 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.

(soft music) (gentle music)