Rare 'fish city' footage reveals hidden world

Ajouté : 2026-05-17

[00:00:01]On a small boat on Lake Huron, there's little to see.

[00:00:04]>> Okay, good luck.

[00:00:06]>> A drop of drone beneath the waves and you enter a different world.

[00:00:12]Silver flashes in the deep blue.

[00:00:14]Thousands of gizzard shad, whiskered catfish glide past. Smallmouth bass up close and personal. This spot has long been known to locals as a place to fish, but never before seen like this. It's a good spot to go fishing. Um, and so we were hoping we would get lucky, too. Um, but no one had really had a chance to look under the water there, and it was pretty jaw-dropping.

[00:00:38]>> The video was captured by documentary filmmakers Zach Melnik and Ivon Drabert using a $250,000 underwater drone, one of only 10 in the world and the only one operating in freshwater. It allows them to film parts of the Great Lakes rarely seen from the surface. We kind of called it fish city because that that's kind of what it's like. You have a dozen or more species all going about their fishy things. What attracts these fish is warmth. Water drawn from Lake Hiron to cool Bruce nuclear generating station is released back warmer than the surrounding lake, creating a pocket of heat. It looks abundant, but scientists say that can be an illusion. They're concentrating at thermal plumes uh because there's no, you know, there's a lack of food in the main lake is is is an unhealthy sign of what the muscles have done to the main lake.

[00:01:31]>> Those muscles, invasive zebra and quaga have filtered huge amounts of plankton from the lake, eating the food for fish and leaving the water startlingly clear.

[00:01:40]>> So these waters are very clear because uh the invasive muscles are filtering the water column. Though it does become clear >> beneath the beauty, there's a harder truth. A hidden marine paradise that may not be paradise at all. Rather, a rare window below the surface where life isn't spreading out. It's being squeezed