99% Invisible - 197- Fish Cannon

Episode Date: January 27, 2016

The Iron Curtain was an 8,000-mile border separating East from West during the Cold War. Something unexpected evolved in the “no man’s land” that the massive border created. In the absence of human intervention and disruption, an accidental wildlife refuge … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. During the Cold War, a so-called Iron Curtain separated eastern and western Europe, communism from capitalism, the Soviet Union from everyone else. In some places, it was an actual wall, like in Berlin, and in other places, it was just a bar-pwire fence. This border was long, stretching from northern Finland through Central Europe. It covered 12,500 kilometers, or almost 8,000 miles. This mortar was long, stretching from northern Finland through Central Europe. It covered 12 and a half thousand kilometers, or almost 8,000 miles. And all along this 8,000 mile border, there was a nomance land, couple hundred yards across,

where there was almost no human activity. When the Cold War ended and the walls and fences came down, people noticed something interesting. That's reporter Emmett Fitzgerald. This neglected strip of land had become a productive ecosystem. With forests and fields, it was a haven, particularly for migratory birds. Soon after the Berlin Wall fell, conservationists from East and West came together to protect this accidental refuge

for birds and animals. Because the No Man's land was so long, they realized that it could link habitats West and West came together to protect this accidental refuge for birds and animals. Because the No Man's land was so long, they realized that it could link habitats throughout Central Europe. Today, the so-called European Green Belt traces the path of the old iron curtain. It connects national parks and nature preserves and helps animals move around in a landscape dominated by humans. It's what's known as a wildlife corridor.

Wildlife corridors can link to extremely large habitats like two national parks or two national forks or a national forest in a national park, say across a very large freeway, or it can link relatively small fragments of habitats and within very developed metropolitan areas. That's Louise Mazingo. She's chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

and Environmental Planning at the University of California Berkeley. And she says that a wildlife corridor doesn't have to be a massive greenway through Europe. It could be as simple as a concrete pipe or a small, kind of vegetated ditch under a freeway. Wildlife corridors might be the most critical in urban areas, free pipe or a small, kind of vegetated ditch under freeway. Wildlife corridors might be the most critical

in urban areas, because sprawling cities and highways have fragmented a lot of wildlife habitat and have forced animals into isolated pockets, which is a problem because animals need to move around in order to find different food sources and mates. In Southern California and abandoned highway underpass began to link two important pieces of habitat in an otherwise industrial area. And what they found is that both of these habitat zones actually were able to support much larger

populations unexpected because this relatively small concrete underpass was able to connect the two habitat ranges. And so you had even very large predator species like mountain lines being able to be supported by these fragments of habitat in a very urbanized situation. Today, the abandoned underpass is purposefully protected and maintained as a wildlife corridor. But wildlife corridors don't technically have to be corridors. and underpass is purposefully protected and maintained as a wildlife corridor.

But wildlife corridors don't technically have to be corridors. They can be any piece of design that facilitates the safe passage of animals through the human built environment from one piece of habitat to another. And they're not always a product of accident and neglect. Sometimes they're very intentional and carefully designed. One of the oldest examples of humans designing a passageway for animals is the fish ladder,

which helps migratory species of salmon and steelhead trout get over dams that block their annual migrations upriver to spawn. First patented by a Canadian lumber mill owner in 1837, the standard fish ladder is a series of terrorist pools, with just enough space between them to allow a fish to leap from one pool to the next, slowly climbing the ladder to the other side of the dam. The design takes advantage of Sammon's natural ability to swim upstream through rapids and over small waterfalls. So a quick lesson in salmon migration. Salmon babies hatch in the upper reaches of a river and immediately start making the

way down the river to the ocean. They hang out at sea for a few years and then, when it's time to mate, miraculously swim their way back up the exact same river to lay their eggs using magnetic fields and smell to navigate. But in the early 20th century, companies started building giant hydroelectric dams on almost every major river in the United States. And they were way too big for a salmon to jump over. And so, at some of these dams, engineers installed fish ladders to help the salmon out.

And fish ladders have worked well over the years. Part of the problems with fish ladders is that they tend to be very expensive to build. That's Todd Delegon. My name is Todd Delegant. I am the Vice President of Business Development with WUSH Innovations. You'll understand where the name WUSH comes from in a second. Today, there are about 80 to 88,000 barriers in the country

that have an elevation of five feet or more. 88,000 dams that fish have to get around. It's a little hard to tell how many actual fish passage installations are at these barriers all around the country, but it is somewhere between 10 and 15%. We estimate. There are a lot of places where a lot of fish

aren't getting anywhere at all because of the barriers that exist. And that's where Todd's company, Woosh, comes in. Fireed into the sky, the salmon of a coming flying fish. I think fish could fly. Think again, I introduce you to the Woosh Fish Cannon. Take a look. For your sweet piece of technology known as the salmon cannon.

You heard them right. The salmon cannon. The salmon cannon actually started out as an apple cannon. The founder of the company, Vince Bryan, owns orchards along the Columbia River in Eastern Washington. And he noticed that the pickers were spending a lot of their time carrying fruit from the tree to storage bins in the center of the orchard.

It was inefficient. So Vince and Todd built this soft tube, kind of like a fire hose. And inside the tube, they generated a pressure differential, capable of sucking an apple hundreds of feet, and depositing it gently in a storage bin. So they have this effective device for apple picking, but pretty soon they're thinking bigger.

And in the Pacific Northwest, nothing is bigger than salmon. The Columbia was once one of the world's great salmon rivers, but today 14 dams block the fish's path home, and the Columbia salmon migration is a thing of the past. We were working in the Apple orchards in Eastern Washington right along the Columbia River. Vincent Todd could actually see two of Columbia's dams from the orchard. And we sort of looked at each other and said, well, what if you could put a salmon in the tube?

The idea seemed ridiculous at first, but they couldn't let it go. So Vincent Todd head back home to their shop. We set up a fruit tube in our shop, and it was about 25 feet long or so. And we went to the store and bought a dead salmon Small dead salmon and a couple dead trout. So they put the fish in the tube and whoosh It popped out on the other side and then we went out and bought some live

Talapea to see if you know transport through our old agriculture or agriculture tube would cause any effect You know, are there gonna be any damage to the fish? Are the fish going to live? And the tube was about 20, 25 feet long also. And we put the life to Latvia and then they went flying into a tank of water and they just swam around and maybe leans had no issues. We just high-five ourselves. It was great.

So from there, they set about retrofitting their apple tube to transport fish. And a few months later, the salmon cannon was born. But okay, it's not really a cannon. They aren't being blasted out in any way, shape or form. The salmon cannon by Wush Innovations works like this. First they have to get the fish to swim into the tube. Salmon evolved to swim up river river past rapids and over waterfalls and they're attracted to flow. So the company built a false rapid in front of the tube.

In essence, a very small waterfall with, you know, sufficient flow to get the salmon to a particular place along the barrier itself. They are attracted to the flow up and over they come over this sort of first step and literally they will just be directly guided right into our tube itself. Once inside the tube a pressure differential moves the fish forward. So that fish then accelerates through the rest of that tube whether it be 50 feet or 300 feet. They're traveling somewhere between 15 and 22 feet a second.

Inside the tube, it's soft and slippery, with almost no friction. They are, in essence, a slippy slide for fish. You can see some videos where the fish are actually almost swimming. They're doing their natural swimming action through the tube itself. And when they reach the top of the dam Then they find themselves right back in the right back in the river itself so they can continue their journey on the other side of the dam with the barrier The salmon cannon is still pretty new right now It's being used on the Yushiga River in Washington state and they're trying to sell the system to fish and wildlife

Agencies throughout the region a lot of scientists who have tested the system seem excited, particularly because it seems to cause such little stress for the fish. But not everyone who cares about salmon is so gung-ho. It seems like if you need to resort to a cannon to get a fish moving through a river system, that maybe there's something more fundamental wrong with the infrastructure along the river system. This is David Montgomery, I'm a professor of Geomorphology at the University of Washington, and I'm the author of the book, The King of Fish, The Thousand Year Run of Salmon. And David's point is, look, the fish cannon may very well be able to get an adult salmon over a dam safely and cheaply. But that's just treating a

symptom of a deeper problem. In some cases, rivers with lots of dams aren't even really rivers anymore. Just look at the Columbia River, the one right by Vincent Todd's Apple orchard. The dams on the Columbia have turned what was once a mighty torrent into a chain of stagnant reservoirs, and that creates problems that things like fish ladders and salmon cannons can't fix. When salmon eggs hatch, the babies need to get back down the river to the ocean. The juvenile salmon on the Columbia River used to basically surf down the river. They just got out into the current, orient themselves, and the river took them to the sea.

Now, what happens if the river is no longer river, and it's just a series of lakes, they have to swim all the way down. They didn't evolve to do that. This has been a problem for a long time, one that no one's really solved yet. Some babies are making it down, but not enough. On some rivers, people have resorted

to transporting baby salmon downstream with boats and trucks. David's not trying to single out the salmon cannon. There's been a whole host of technologies that people have experimented with to help fish get around dams. But really, the underlying problem is that you've ecologically turned a mighty river into a series of lakes. The Washington State government spends millions of dollars every year on fish liners and other efforts to get fish around dams, but the numbers are still way down.

Around the Puget Sound where I live, around Seattle, we're estimated to be down to about 10% of the salmon that we had historically. Throughout the region it's somewhere about like 5 or 8% and the Columbia River, I think it's down to two percent. You know, it varies river by river. Sam and Declan is complicated. It has to do with several factors such as over-efficient and habitat destruction. And I think that that's a characteristic of a lot of environmental systems.

They're actually more complex than we realize. And the worry is that many of these technological solutions to environmental problems only solve a piece of the problem, without dealing with the overall health of the ecosystem. You might be able to get the fish up the river, but the river itself is still broken. With that in mind, people have recently started calling on the government to remove old dams and return entire river systems to their free flowing state. The idea that you could actually take a major dam out 20 years ago was crazy talk. I mean, that was just not something that people would talk about as a serious political or social possibility.

But now it's happening. After years of protest by indigenous people and conservation groups, dams have come down on the Sandy River in Oregon and the L.W.A. River in Washington State, and the salmon have begun to come back. We're not going to get rid of every dam dam in the country, but a lot of them are reaching the end of their structural lifetimes, and some are just not profitable anymore. And in those cases, David wants us to look at each one on a case-by-case basis and ask, well what about this damn?

Does this one still make sense? Todd Delegant of Wush supports taking out old, unprofitable dams, but a concern for anti-dam activists is that technology is like the salmon cannon, could slow down these efforts, or even enable more dams to be built because companies can say, well don't worry about the salmon migration, people have designed solutions to that problem. And that's a worry with wildlife corridors more generally. Wildlife corridors cannot be a substitution for preservation of key habitat areas. That's Louise Mozingo again from UC Berkeley. The reconnection of fragmented landscapes should not be an excuse to destroy existing really

high quality habitats. We have too few of them and we need to preserve the ones that are functioning really well that are supporting large and diverse wildlife populations. Corridors only really make sense, she says, in places where habitats have already been fragmented. And now you can knit them back together in ways that support, if not a robust population, an adequate population for the species to survive. And in those situations where humans have already had a huge impact on the landscape,

design for the benefit of non-humans could be the key to keeping wildlife around. We spent most of the 20th century carving up and dividing the landscape with impassable objects made of asphalt in concrete. But if you zoom in, you can see the effort to stitch together habitats with the tiniest of threads that could make all the difference. A crab ladder here, a salamander tunnel there, and that's great. But if we're honest, we can't fix every problem we created by building something new. For a species like salmon to survive in the modern world, it's going to take a patchwork approach of addition and subtraction.

Sometimes the best thing for wildlife is for us to just do our best to stay out of the way. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstad, Avery Truffleman, Sheree Fusef, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KAL, W.S.A.F.R.N.S. Go and produced out of the offices of Arxign, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify, but right now you can be one of the first to see our brand new completely redesigned home on the internet that's fully responsive and achingly beautiful. It's 99pi.

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