The Nihilistic Euphoria of the Fish Tube Updated

The Nihilistic Euphoria of the Fish Tube

Over the weekend, a 2014 video of a salmon being shot through a thin, flexible tube went viral.

Memes appeared imagining what the fish were thinking and feeling as they passed through the Salmon Cannon, as the salmon-propelling tube is known. On "The Tardily Prove," Stephen Colbert wondered if the tube's inventors considered naming the device the Bass Blaster. The New Yorker wrote, non-ironically, about the "nihilistic euphoria of the fish tube."

Merely, as internet hot flashes do, the excitement died down and the hordes dissipated, leaving a far more interesting – and important – story behind.

The Salmon Cannon, born in the apple fields of Eastern Washington, is a key component of the Colville Confederated Tribes' plans to reintroduce salmon to the Upper Columbia River and, eventually, the Spokane River.

Swim, slide and glide

The Salmon Cannon is fabricated by Seattle-based Whooshh Innovations.

The master is simple: The tube, which is a proprietary plastic mix and very smooth on the inside, molds to the body of each fish that swims into it. Misters, placed on the exterior of the tube, further lubricate the interior with water and permit the fish to breath. Then, an air blower pressurizes the space from beneath, pushing the salmon upwardly at speeds that tin can reach 20 mph, much like a pneumatic bank tube.

"From the fish'due south perspective, it's swim in, slide and glide," said Vincent Bryan Three, CEO of Whooshh Innovations.

The system doesn't hurt the fish and causes them little to no stress, according to multiple studies. In fact, some research indicates that the system saves the salmon so much free energy that they are more than likely to survive the long swim back to their spawning grounds.

The delicacy of the entire mechanized functioning is a reflection of the invention's birth in the apple tree industry.

While Bryan grew upwardly in the Seattle area, his family owns orchard country in Eastern Washington. Later graduating from law school at Seattle Academy, Bryan worked in international constabulary and eventually found a chore with Adobe in Seattle. But by 2004, he was growing tired of the piece of work and took a sabbatical. During that time, he got more involved in the family business concern and, spurred partially by immigration-related labor shortages, started to wonder if at that place were a more than "efficient" and mechanized manner to pick apples.

To observe out, he quit Adobe and started a company that invented machinery that could chop-chop and gently choice apples from trees. He got millions in seed money from an agriculture manufacturing visitor and fabricated progress on his apple tree-picking technology.

But in 2011, he got distracted from his original mission after seeing a helicopter and being told information technology was carrying salmon over an otherwise impassable dam.

That, he idea at the fourth dimension, must be expensive. And inefficient.

He'd grown upwardly angling and had always "been passionate about fish," so he looked at some of equipment he'd designed to transport apples and, in particular, at a tube filled with cushioning textile and thought, Why non fish?

To test his suspicion that the technology might translate, he went to a fish market in Seattle, bought live tilapia and fed them into a tube originally designed for apples.

"The tilapia seemed happy," he said.

Like that, Whooshh Innovations was born.

What about dams?

Bryan saw that the technology could help solve 1 of the thornier barriers to restoring salmon in the Columbia River and to boosting other struggling salmon populations: dams.

Dams, even those with fish ladders, decimate salmon populations, equally the fish make long upstream journeys to the spawning beds in which they were born in order to reproduce.

Dams without ladders, similar Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee, are 100% deadly. Since 1930, when Grand Coulee was built, the salmon runs – once an annual bounty relied upon by native peoples – disappeared virtually overnight.

The Salmon Cannon hopes to offer fish a detour, by transporting them up and over the dam through a tube.

But, as some pointed out later the technology's surge of online popularity over the weekend, the technology only addresses a unmarried symptom of larger issues facing the species.

"Salmon cannons have their purpose to get over some dams that don't take fish ladders," said Sam Mace, the Inland Northwest manager of Relieve Our Wild Salmon in an email. "But they aren't a solution on dams like the lower Snake, that have fish ladders and where the larger problem is the smolts having to get downstream, dealing both with the dams themselves and the hot water conditions, ho-hum migration, and predator problems created by reservoirs."

But the Snake River and the main stem of the Columbia are different systems with unlike challenges.

As Mace points out, "Smolts die in the Columbia reservoirs as well, but the atmospheric condition are ameliorate. The temps don't go as loftier on the Columbia. With the Snake running through such hot desert country, temps become over lxxx degrees at Ice Harbor frequently."

Bryan doesn't believe that wholesale dam removal is a feasible path frontward, because "we also need the clean free energy that those dams produce." Merely he doesn't dismiss the other problems caused by dams. Instead, he said, the technology developed by Whooshh could help address those problems, namely predation and heat stress.

Which, oddly, brings u.s.a. back to apples.

Chinnok in a tube. (Whooshh Innovations / Courtesy)

Salmon of my eye?

If you lot buy an apple at the store, chances are it was sorted and packaged past a robot. In packing plants in Eastern Washington, apples pass under complicated scanning equipment that sort the fruit based on size, colour and condition.

Whooshh's salmon technology tin do the same. Only with alive fish.

The fish outset swim into a big enclosed box. While inside, they briefly pass through a pocket of air. While in that air pocket, photos are taken. A estimator and then determines what type of fish it is, whether it has any visible wounds and how large information technology is.

"The calculator is making a decision before information technology gets to the tube," Bryan said.

If, for instance, a predatory and invasive Northern Pike swims into the machine, it could be diverted to a "grinder," Bryan said. Or, if a hatchery-raised salmon appeared, it could be diverted back downstream. Those decisions would be up to the fishery managers, Bryan said.

He believes this could reduce the predator population in reservoirs, giving salmon some respite.

Equally for heat stress, preliminary studies have shown that fish using the salmon cannon are able to travel faster and further upstream before the summer heat makes portions of the Columbia impassable.

And Bryan said he has some ideas on how to help smolts trying to return to the ocean, although he isn't ready to talk about them.

"Our whole goal has been fish passage," he said.

The tribes

Concluding week, before the Salmon Cannon went viral, the Colville Confederated Tribes released 30 salmon into the Columbia River above Chief Joseph Dam. That's the start fourth dimension salmon accept been in that stretch of river since the dam was built.

Now, a Whooshh Salmon Cannon is on a barge at Brewster, Washington, waiting for final approving from the U.S. Ground forces Corps of Engineers to travel upstream to Chief Joseph to behave alive-river tests. There is already ane installed at the Cle Elum hatchery, transporting fish from the hatchery to Cle Elum Lake.

If approved by the Corps of Engineers, the organisation could become an important tool in the Colville Tribes' endeavor to restore salmon to their native waters in the Upper Columbia.

The Whooshh system costs betwixt $2 and $4 million, depending on where its installed.

"This could serve as another viable fashion that we can motion fish," said John Sirois, a fisheries coordinator for the Upper Columbia United Tribes. "We're all about having another avenue to assistance the fish and help the salmon."

There are enough of legal and biological questions to be addressed earlier Salmon Cannons go a regular sight at Columbia River dams. But the innovation has momentum. And Bryan, the founder and CEO, is passionate.

A logical and linear thinker, he spends near of a two-hour interview talking almost the scientific discipline and physics behind his work. But, toward the stop, another deeper motivation appears to surface.

As a infant, Bryan was very sick, was even on expiry's door, he'south told. So, his aunt, a nun, had her entire convent pray for her baby nephew. He survived.

"I'1000 still hither for some reason," he said. "Perchance it'due south for the fish."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the city in which Whooshh Innovations is based. It'southward based in Seattle.