Government officials in Alabama are giving an old riverboat casino a from Indiana a new life — not floating down the state’s copious waterways, but at the bottom of the sea.

Alabama-based news channel WPMI detailed the unusual plan to scuttle the riverboat, called the Argosy VI, off the coast of Orange Beach, a small city roughly an hour south east of Mobile. According to the outlet, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources purchased the Argosy VI with plans to turn it into an artificial reef.

Earlier this week, teams of workers gutted the interior of the vessel, clearing slot machines and other gambling fixtures to make room for future residents: mussels, barnacles, sponges, and corals.

“You’ll start seeing fish on it within a few weeks, but for it to become a highly productive reef structure its going to take a couple years before all the tuna kits, the bryozoa, the corals before they start really settling on it and providing the base of the food web that’s going to feed the larger predatory fishes,” Craig Newton, supervisor of the Alabama Marine Resources Fisheries Section told WPMI.

Completed in 1997 for the price of $6.5 million, the Argosy VI is a flat-bottomed, four-floored passenger vessel spanning nearly 400 feet in length — an impressive footprint for a boat that spent half its life in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Argosy VI had a maximum capacity of 4,407 people, with room for over 1,700 slot machines, a number rivaling midsized land-based casinos.

Once considered the world’s largest riverboat casino, the Argosy VI is now taking its place as part of the world’s largest artificial reef system.

Begun in 1953 with the sinking of 250 junk cars, Alabama’s world-leading artificial reef system comprises some 1,060 square miles of coastal water. Over the years, state officials have purposefully scuttled untold numbers of barges, ships, oil and gas platforms, bridges, docks, culverts, and even army tanks to create habitats for coastal critters.

Because the Alabama sea floor is mostly a slurry of dirt and detritus, conservation officials say the artificial reef elements provide a sturdy habitat for corals and marine invertebrates to call home. This in turn creates a thriving ecosystem that can support larger fish life, like red snappers, sheepshead seabream, and triggerfish.

In addition to improving marine diversity, the artificial reef has a knock-on effect of attracting tourists to the region.

“Alabama is very limited in the amount of hard bottom or coral areas here in this part of the Gulf of Mexico,” Kevin Anson, director of the Alabama DCNR’s marine resources division told WPMI.”A lot of the reef fish species that many people like to target while they’re fishing require reef structure at least for some segment of their life history.”

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