Science

Salmon cannon: Why the internet is going wild for fast-fired fish

August 13, 2019 16:14·
The

The"salmon cannon has been around since 2014 but Twitter discovered it over the weekend

And while this may seem like a ridiculous way to move salmon, Whoosh makes the claim that it actually improves economical use of shared water resources as well as fish welfare.

Now the salmon cannon is nothing new: Whooshh Innovations' Fish Transport System has been around since 2011, when the company began to prototype an environmentally friendly system to safely transport live fish from one areas to another.

"This salmon cannon transports the fish between bodies of water", Cheddar tweeted last week.

There is a mysterious alchemy to the formation of a social media trend. And we can only imagine how frightening being lifted up into the sky by giant, mechanical birds must be for fish.

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Aside from the intense urge people apparently have to ride the fish tube, it seems like this is an innovation that's probably an improvement when it comes to protecting the environment. And John Oliver doesn't just talk about anything. I wanted to insert myself into the tube and be shot out into a lake.

What do you think about this Salmon Cannon? The first cannon required laborers to feed the fish into the system by hand, but new upgrades to the system now allow the fish to swim into the cannon themselves to bypass the man-made structures. "It's sort of been outrageous how long this has taken to catch on".

"The salmon are propelled by the differential pressure between the front and the back of the fish and sent into the flexible tube that expands to their size. It worked, and it was the "a-ha" moment that caused the company to pivot from fruit to fish".

He cited an April study from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that found salmon slung through the cannon sustained fewer injuries than traditional systems like fish ladders, which force salmon to jump up "rungs" to get upstream. "It should be a comfortable ride for them". The innovative system has the capability to transport almost 50,000 fish upstream over these man-made obstacles every day, efficiently allowing the salmon to lay their eggs in greater numbers during these important migration periods.

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