(upbeat inquisitive music) (water sloshing) (pole clanking) - So we have two scientific objectives with these subs here.

And one of them is to pair with the ferry that services Beaver Island from Charlevoix and CMU mounted some water quality equipment on that ferry.

So every time that ferry goes at 32 mile, we look at it as a 32-mile transect where we're collecting water quality data every two minutes.

And then we actually collect raw water samples that we could analyze for.

We could do chemistry on that.

We could other look at biology in that water too.

And that water is collected every 12 minutes.

Well, that water is being collected from the sea chest which puts it at about just under two meters of depth.

And what we don't have is any data that compare with that from the bottom because Lake Michigan stratifies into specific layers due to temperature density differences.

So the bottom chemistry and biology is very different from the top.

(motorboat engine revving) On the M.V.

Chippewa, we can send equipment down and bring it back up but that's in one location.

And every time we do that, it'll take us a minimum half hour to 45 minutes to do that once.

Once up and down, and that's at one point where these subs, we can put our water quality monitoring equipment on these subs.

And on Saturday, we did a two-mile transect right on the bottom.

We stayed on the bottom, we followed the path of that ferry.

So we have the matching data from the bottom and the top.

The other objective that we have, we were contacted by the Michigan DNR, and they're interested in spawning habitat, potential spawning habitat for lake trout, cisco, and whitefish.

And they had some specific areas that they wanted us to record and look to see if that is one, is it already good habitat or two, could it be restored?

Unfortunately, we did not find the habitat we were looking for and I guess it was disappointing because really all I saw the entire time down there, I saw nuisance algae.

I saw invasive round gobies and I saw invasive zebra and quagga mussels and that was it for over an hour bottom time.

It was a perspective I never had.

I've seen the bottom with our ROV.

I've seen the bottom scuba diving, but to see that distance of that same view of all of that energy being tied up in nuisance algae and invasive species.

I think any aquatic research or any marine research could very much benefit from it because you can strap the equipment that you need onto this.

It has an arm.

So there are 4,000 year old tree stumps out there and I was controlling the arm to get a sample of that to be able to carbon date it.

I mean, there's just so much you could do with these things that it's unbelievable.

(upbeat inquisitive music)