All hail the Salmon Cannon! Not only does this new technology give wild salmon their migration routes back, it also ensures that hydroelectric dams produce renewable energy with less impact on the surrounding environment.
Don’t get us wrong, no one dreamed up a 'Salmon Cannon' and made it happen. Like many of the greatest scientific inventions, the Salmon Cannon idea came about in the kind of round-about way that only a Salmon Cannon idea can, and these large, tasty fish are all the better for it.
Engineers at the US-based Whooshh Innovations were developing a special cannon to transport fruit gently without bruising it, when they heard about government researchers trying to solve a problem caused by their new hydroelectric dams. Unlike conventional dams, that are built to control the flow of water, hydroelectric dams are built to produce power. As water gushes through them and makes contact with a large number of turbines, these turbines are able to spin magnets over metal coils, which produces electricity.
While this electricity is clean and renewable, the dams themselves have been causing damage to the environments around them, and in Washington State, they’ve been blocking the migration paths of several populations of wild salmon.
Salmon ladders have been put in place at some of these dams - they’re basically slanted mazes that direct the fish away from the turbines - but some of the new dams are just too tall for these ladders to work. When the engineers at Whooshh Innovations heard about this, they thought, why not build cannons to gently transport the salmon over the dams to reconnect with their migration paths?
"So we put a tilapia in the fruit tube," said Todd Deligan, Whooshh's vice president, to Josh DZieza at the Verge. "It went flying, and we were like, ‘Huh, check that out.'"
It took the team five years to get the cannon right, but now it’s been tailored to both trout and salmon. A test was recently run with wild Chinook salmon at the Roza Dam in Washington, and so far, things seem to be going great. The salmon were quite happy to swim into launching tubes on their own, and once inside, a vacuum gives them an initial boost before the pressure behind them takes over and propels them the rest of the way at speeds of up to 35 kilometres per hour (22 miles p/h) until they’re shot out the other end. Mist is applied inside the tube to keep the fish wet.
The US Department of Energy will run another test in September, says Dzieza at the Verge, and in several weeks the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will use a 45-metre-long (or 150 feet) mobile tube system to propel salmon up a 60-metre-high (20-foot) embankment into the back of a truck to see how they fare.
Deligan is totally aware of how ridiculous their new invention looks and sounds, as he told the Verge:
"At a talk at the National Hydropower Association, I hit play on the video and the first fish goes flying out, and the audience is dying. I had to say, 'It's okay to laugh, this is utterly ridiculous.' Then people start talking and they say, 'Holy cow, why hadn't we thought of something like this before?'"
"Wildlife departments and public utilities already do strange things to get salmon past manmade barriers, putting them on trucks, loading them onto barges, and in a few cases, lifting them by helicopter,” says Dzieza at the Verge, "The tubes, Deligan says, could be a less labor-intensive and more effective method, plus it would be less traumatising to the fish than getting caught and driven around on a truck."
The team is now continuing to test and develop the technology to get it ready for installation in several of Washington's dams. Here's how it works:
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