Team Researching Mussels Finds Shipwreck From 1895

A husband-and-wife team filming a documentary on invasive mussels in the Great Lakes found a shipwreck from 1895—covered in mussels. Yvonne Drebert and Zach Melnick searched the Lake Huron lakebed after fisheries scientists notified them of an "unusual bump" in a flat area, CBS News reports. They say they "expected to find a pile of rocks" when they sent their remotely operated vehicle 280 feet below the surface. Instead, they discovered what they describe as a "huge structure." With the help of a local marine archaeologist and a marine historian, they identified the shipwreck as the Africa, which sank 128 years ago with the loss of all 11 men on board.

The Africa was towing a barge from Ashtabula, Ohio, to Owen Sound, Ontario, when it sank during a snowstorm. Drebert and Melnick say the quagga mussels covering the shipwreck made identification difficult, but a follow-up mission confirmed that the wreck had the same measurements as the Africa. They had been working on a documentary on how quagga mussels are "sucking the life" of the Great Lakes by devouring plankton and disrupting the food chain, reports the Owen Sound Sun-Times. The mussels have also made the lakes much clearer. "It's a bit of a double-edged sword for us because it's kind of great to be able to see with the clarity the mussels have created but they're also having these huge ecosystem impacts," Drebert says.

Preservationists say the mussels have encrusted more than 1,400 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes and are slowly destroying their hulls, the CBC reports. "Before discovering the Africa, our work focused on the ecological impacts of the mussels—which have devastated fisheries around the lakes. We hadn't considered the effect they could have on our cultural heritage," Melnick said in a press release, "but the mussels have truly changed everything in the deep waters of the Great Lakes." Drebert and Melnick found the wreck just a few hundred yards from their home in Larsen Cove, Ontario—a community that was named after the captain of the Africa, Hans Larsen. (More shipwreck stories.)