Whether you are a sport fisherman, a conservationist, or simply like to eat good fish, the havoc wreaked by massive dams on river-spawning fish (like salmon) should concern you. Salmon are incredible athletes, able to propel themselves several feet vertically, but they can’t scale concrete walls by themselves. To get them over small dams, fish ladders or lifts are often constructed. Getting past major barriers, like the dams on the Columbia River, requires catching the fish and transporting them upstream — n process that is too expensive to be implemented everywhere it is needed.

Whooshh Innovations has come up with a novel new solution: shooting the fish into and through a tubular cannon that propels them over any intervening obstacle or directly into a vehicle tank for further transport. The cannon uses air pressure to move the fish, but mixed with plenty of mist to keep the fish wet and healthy. After lots of testing with dead fish, the system has now been successfully used in a real situation, propelling salmon over the Roza dam in Washington state.

Whooshh has built systems that can transport fish 230 feet with a 15 foot vertical lift, but says that its technology could be used to build transporters that would work at ten times those distances. It is already able to move fish at the rate of nearly one per second, but thinks that number could also be increased for large scale deployments. It actually doesn’t take that much pressure to move the fish through the tube — typically from 1 to 2 psi. Fish as heavy as 15 kilograms have been successfully transported, and the opening of the tube is scaled so that fish too large to transport can’t enter it. Importantly, fish seem more than willing to swim into the entrance of the tube, so there is no need to catch or artificially corral them.

This isn’t the first time a massive cannon or vacuum has been used with salmon. Modern salmon fishing boats keep their catch in refrigerated salt water (RSW) that can flow at temperatures below 32F. They are then vacuumed out of the ships’ holds and into processing facilities using a large hose — like the one these fishermen are manning after returning with their catch to their home port in Homer, Alaska:

While most of the attention related to dams is focused on salmon — especially the dozen endangered species of salmon affected by dams in the Northwest, the Whooshh system has a unique benefit that it will work for all species attempting to move upstream (or downstream, if it is deployed in that direction). So, other species that are not covered in existing manual transport systems, like shad, herring, sturgeon and steelhead, can also benefit.

Whooshh already sells fish transport systems for use in commercial fish processing plants, so it has plenty of experience in this area. So far, the dam-jumping version has only deployed in test situations and a pilot project at the Roza dam, but if the test results hold up, expect to see fish popping into the air over a dam near you soon.

[Image Credit: Homer fishing boat]