Before we start on this, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this has anything to do with animal cruelty. It doesn’t. It does have a fair amount to do with sticking live fish into a tube and launching them into the air, though. The world doesn’t have enough of that.
A company called Whooshh Innovations is looking at a way to make transporting live fish a much simpler affair and they’ve created a live fish launcher in order to do so. The idea behind it is the use the system to help salmon and trout to bypass man-made obstacles that are on their spawning route, something that has traditionally done by hand in the past.
Instead, fish can be loaded into a transportation tube – by hand, at the moment – where they are dropped into a water-filled truck for transport to another location but the Whooshh tubes could be used to allow fish to bypass hazards completely without needing to load them into vehicles.
That’s because the length of the tubes that fish can be shot through is getting longer and, if Whooshh’s Todd Deligan is to be believed, in some tests with the launcher “…the fish just swim right in”. It might be possible to set up a lengthy Whooshh tube on a dam and just have salmon and the like launch themselves over the man-made barricade one day – and that day cannot come fast enough.
[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSBS2F9VXaE”]
Source: The Verge
