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Restoring Salmon To Their Original Habitat -- With a Cannon
StartsWithABang writes Hydroelectric dams are one of the best and oldest sources of green, renewable energy, but — as the Three Gorges Dam in China exemplifies — they often cause a host of environmental and ecological problems and challenges. One of the more interesting ones is how to coax fish upstream in the face of these herculean walls that can often span more than 500 feet in height. While fish ladders might be a solution for some of the smaller dams, they're limited in application and success. Could Whooshh Innovations' Salmon Cannon, a pneumatic tube capable of launching fish up-and-over these dams, finally restore the Columbia River salmon to their original habitats?
Then we can have a shark cannon... that will attach lasers to their heads ... And put bees in their mouths.
The cold war with Russia is back baby!
I get pretty pissed off when people say that hydroelectric power is "cheap" or "free" or "clean" energy, or that all the money to build the dams came from the Federal government so everyone should enjoy the benefits.
It DOES have ongoing costs to people who live in the region, and they aren't small. While some recreational activities are created, others are lost, so that's a zero-sum. But then there are the other ecological costs: loss of fish and fisheries for many thousands of square (not to mention linear) miles of waterway. There is the loss of land behind the dam which was often (perhaps typically) farmland. And so on.
There are many other factors: wildlife typically will no longer migrate across the reservoir, leading to loss of habitat. Etc. etc.
It ain't free, and people in the region do pay for it.
Can't they just evolve and grow legs to hike up? We did it, dammit!
Table-ized A.I.
Use the cannon to shoot them into an oven so I can enjoy salmon meals much easier, goddammit.
Having read the article, I am severely disappointed.
Q: What did the fish say when it bumped into a concrete wall?
A: Dam!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I thought this might be a special father's day project, but tfa didn't seem to feature a build log or anything. Disappointed.
So when do we get the pneumatic people movers, a la Futurama?
I'm also wondering if the guys who came up with this got the idea from the show.
#DeleteChrome
A fish cannon sounds like a idea Nintendo Super Mario Bros game idea.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It's an eagle entertainment device.
I love the idea.
I think we can also use this technology to help birds migrate. Because of changes in weather patterns have been affecting bird migration patterns. Using a cannon to gently launch them into the correct places while maximizing environmental impacts would be awesome.
The people in the region pay for it in the normal way too: with money. The federal government doesn't just give the dams away. They are still owned by a federal agency that sells the power to local utilities.
The original article:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8...
Whooshh Innovations
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Given that many dams (including the Three Gorges) have a boat lift and locks, perhaps the answer is to adapt these so that they also transport fish at the same time. Or adapt fish stairs so that they apply a principle similar to a lock where sections automatically raise and fall to give fish some respite and assistance to reach the top.
I cannot independently confirm the truth of this; but I was told, in all apparent seriousness, by someone I know well and who I know to have a long association with the hydroelectric generation business, that the term for what happens to a fish that fails to avoid the turbine intakes is "turbine induced stress". As one might imagine, this 'stress' tends toward the lethal end of the spectrum.
But Hydroelectric is incredibly safe when you look at all other forms of energy production. It certainly has never displaced as many people or killed as many people as nuclear.
Oh wait!
The halo effect describes cognitive bias people have about others based on an impression. It applies to industry just as much as it applies to people. Look at the full lifecycle cost of anything and nothing is really without issues, especially hydroelectric power which currently wins top prize as worst accident by death toll ever though the Chinese government list it as a natural disaster.
As far as economists see it, it is free. Something of high value that lasts a long time just does not plug sensibly into their compound interest formula and boggles their tiny minds. Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Alpha Centuri had the ability to raise/lower terrain with terra former units... It also had a weather model good enough that this effected rainfall and thus nutrient production. It wasn't usually an efficient use of resources; but building 'moisture walls' and then watching your hapless opponent's population starve sure was sweet...
Well son, you can hold your net/claw up high, or low.
Dont let the salmon hit you in the head.
This would add a dimension to air fishing
previously unexplored.
I would think they need to do more testing. Sure it looks cool and they appear to survive because we see them swimming afterwards. However, not all fish can tolerate a lot of handling and if they lose too much of their slimy outer coating they don't do so well.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
How can fish climb a ladder without hands?
Nature will undoubtedly intervene. Selection will naturally favor salmon that fly better. Evolution will possibly favor simple gliding at first. Then, add some maneuvarability to just enough dodge the birds and land in better places. Specialization might spawn a more nocturnal flying 'stealth' branch. Then, as the years go by....
Anthropocene fallout : Flying Squid.
Hydroelectric dams are "green" now?!?! Then it goes on to describe the devastation they cause to the environment up and down the river?
The problem is that you kill just as large a percentage on the downstream trip, largely due to dissolved gas bubbles in their flesh due to dramatic pressure changes. So even if you can get the adult salmon upstream to spawn, the baby salmon can't survive the downstream trip because they get the bends.
Even if they get past all of the dams, they have to go past the mildly radioactive section around Hanford and then the rather polluted Columbia River Estuary below Bonneville Dam.
Dear Engineers Piss off. This is like fixing land rape with a parking lot.
Without some video.
I haven't performed the calculations behind it but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's cheaper than nuclear power
Then do the calculations before spouting off publicly and anonymously about it.
for fish to colonize the ocean. Well, except for the fact that this cannon actually exists.
it's clean because using the power produces no big emissions(apart from manufacturing replacement parts).
Emissions are not the only type of pollution that matters. Hydro dams mess up ecosystems rather badly in a lot of cases. They might be the least worst alternative but "clean" in this case is only a relative term. They are certainly not consequence free.
also the thing with salmon is tha wild salmon from the rivers wouldn't fill the supermarkets anyways - it's just a sport... a niche sport.
Salmon serve ecological purposes beyond simply occupying space in grocery stores and providing entertainment for fishermen. Salmon are important parts of food chains and dams tend to interrupt this food chain with sometimes serious consequences.
Fish can go over most anything.
Some can in some cases but be careful about generalizing. Most fish cannot easily adapt to the sudden appearance of a dam blocking the entire river nor can the other parts of the food chain that depend on the fish. These are ecosystems that developed over thousands/millions of years. Nature can adapt in time but it often does not happen overnight or without consequence.
Somehow they went up and over Niagara falls, Victoria falls and many other enormous falls.
Why do you presume they went over the falls? More likely the waterways were joined in some other way once upon a time. While fish can appear in some pretty amazing places, how they get there isn't by magic.
More proof that medium.com and its self-promotors aren't worth the time to even visit.
As far as economists see it, it is free.
You apparently don't know any actual economists. I do and I assure you they would declare the above statement to be nonsense. So would the engineers, financiers, and accountants who actually work on these sorts of projects.
Something of high value that lasts a long time just does not plug sensibly into their compound interest formula and boggles their tiny minds.
Well since you are so damn smart why don't you show them how it is done and collect your Nobel prize.
Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Never mind that economists do this all the time. You would know that had you actually bothered to look.
n/t
Well I can honestly say I did not see that one coming, but I do have a pretty good idea how they got the idea. A potato gun which by itself is not very fun, but you add diethyl ether, beer, a boat, and fish then you have some grade a entertainment.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things. Wait ... what year is this?
With Cannons. At least the nature documentaries will be more interesting. Maybe combine it with pumpkin chunking...
To being able to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest wiiiiiith, A Herring!
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Slaps you in the face with a fish; leaves a nasty sting and smell.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Mr. President! We must not allow a Salmon Cannon gap!
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Who writes this stuff...'...one of the oldest green,...'...'cause a host of environmental and ecological damage'...what EXACTLY is the definition of 'green'? O yeah, I know 'blessed by some group of elitists who think they know better than the rest of us...'....
What a lousy article.
I've read that a vacuum sucks the fish into the tube, and then air pressure propels them along the tube, but how the hell is that achieved?
How do you get a vacuum at the start and then pressure all the way up?
Would you kindly show your maths for that?
Oh, stop whining about the little fry. All this time and still no mention of the BASS CANNON?
Slashdot, I am disappoint.
Now we know what Kari Byron, Grant Imahara & Tory Belleci's next project is
I don't know if this could be practical, but I bet it'd be fun to watch.
Hey ma! Here comes another one!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Pneumatic Salmion Cannons.
Howe about Pneumatic People Cannons.. hurtle over all that logged jammed traffic and make People jam instead.. get to your office in seconds.
Why not a fish elevator? http://videos.masslive.com/rep...
"Don't lose your mind trying to set it free..."
Or what about the original dam builders, beavers?
The ecosystems have evolved to actually depend on beavers. Beavers existed LOOONG before humans started messing with the landscape in a big way and they actually are a benefit similar to how some types of trees actually need a periodic fire. We screwed it up when we came in and started trapping them and nearly drove them extinct at one point.
Not saying what we're doing is ideal, and our scale is usually much larger, but flooding is hardly a new experience for ecosystems..
The sort we do isn't really comparable in most cases to any sort of natural process. There is a huge difference between a natural dam and one of our hydro-electric dams.
So you can re-roll misfires.
A final year undergraduate subject entitled precisely that is where I came to such a sad realisation, later reinforced when working in a mechanical engineering university department that shared a building with business studies and later again working on various projects on private enterprise.
It's the task of the engineer to quantify such costs to avoid the not much more than teenage financial "wizards" going all Enron on you with their simplistic bullshit and deliberate distortions. There are plenty of case studies out there. Third world energy projects especially show the extremes of how inaccurate it can be or Enron and many others closer to home.
It's a truly spectacular reading comprehension failure if you think I am being critical of "Jane Q. Public" in any way. Admit it, you just saw the little dot of color behind my name and decided I needed to be taken down a peg or two since I've been critical of you in the past.
Take a look at some case studies especially for things like large scale third world energy projects. It doesn't get much more complicated than a compound interest formula. The overseas (and some local) activities of Enron brought that into the public spotlight.
Of course it could be said that such people are not "real" economists, they are just pointless "yes" men, but those pushing the large projects call them economists.
An especially spectacular failure was a cull of millions of sheep on the suggestion of an economist to drive up the price of wool through scarcity. He failed to take competition from cotton into account. He was of course in the position due to political connections but that's who you get as leading economists.
That's what idiots like you don't comprehend. We can work to mitigate the harm, but it isn't a continuing harm. The land lost doesn't increase every year. We're clearly coming up with ways to handle fish.
So, fuck you.
A specific type of situation where a field of knowledge is dumbed down to almost no knowledge at all is not an example of "ignoring a whole field of knowledge".
I suggest you reply to my posts instead of to your own baggage.
I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium
From these humblest origins of freight -- where the simple brain of a duck determines terminus loci -- human kind has leveraged the Duck Foot Apparatus into a vast global network with computer-optimized logistics management. Producers and shippers of commodities no longer need to wait until they are stepped on or eaten by a duck. This confers numerous advantages for cargo weight and scheduling and the ability to choose destination.
Early inventors believed you merely needed to graft duck feet onto Medieval torture devices to harness the abilities of ducks. In the Wright Brothers' first aircraft design running duck feet gathered the seeds of grass and mosses during takeoff. The goose neck trailer arose from early attempts to shove large volumes of freight down the neck of a beheaded goose, until it was discovered that large swinging doors in back facilitate deeper penetration and ease of loading.
Anyway, "the rest is history", and what the hell does that mean?? From milligrams to mega tonnes, the modern network of Things That Do Duck Things though they no longer resemble ducks carries invasive species to every "corner" of the globe. And what the hell does that mean??
Ocean shipping networks carry so much freight you can see their routes arching and sagging on this map. This is partially offset by the buoyant effect of air cargo.
To those of us old enough to remember air travel in the bowels of fowls, what a marvel modern transportation is indeed.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>