8 ms·
Salmon Cannon Fires 40 Fish a Minute
- nether 12y agointo my mouth
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI do not want to be there when the bears learn implicitly that salmon spring from the end of the tube :-) But I love the concept.
- ommunist 12y agoFor the bears this company will supply intrastomach vacuum feeder, once supplied from the salmon cannon, it will fire every fourth salmon directly into bear's guts.
- coldcode 12y agoAs a bear I will fall in love with the lunch tube.
- yutah 12y agosome commercial fisheries will enjoy renting those too
- lubos 12y agoCould this be used for humans? Looks like fun way to commute.
- DLister 12y agoYou mean kind of like the public pneumatic tube transport in futurama?
- yen223 12y agoBut with none of the comfort. Or safety.
- skeletonjelly 12y agoLunchlady Doris, have you got any grease?
- gurkendoktor 12y agoThe first thing I thought of was the cannon travel agency in Secret of Mana :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPVt4WBMaxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPVt4WBMaxE
- jdleesmiller 12y agoThere have been several Personal Rapid Transit [1] systems proposed with this sort of technology, e.g.: http://zapatopi.net/inteli-tube/ http://zapatopi.net/inteli-tube/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Rapid_Transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Rapid_Transit
- skaevola 12y agoThat's a joke website. eg: http://zapatopi.net/belgium/ http://zapatopi.net/belgium/
- dredmorbius 12y agoIt's not unlike some high-rise evacuation systems: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=vekxtAF5HPg http://fixyt.com/watch?v=vekxtAF5HPg http://fixyt.com/watch?v=I8g7AXTzD_I http://fixyt.com/watch?v=I8g7AXTzD_I http://fixyt.com/watch?v=eohpyx8NzMg http://fixyt.com/watch?v=eohpyx8NzMg
- ars 12y agoWatch only the second video, the first is terrible.
- Gracana 12y agoOh, I'm glad you said that. I didn't watch the second video because I didn't expect it to be any better than the first, but it turns out it's way more informative.
- ommunist 12y agoThis device in its usefulness reminds me the squid gun of the infamous Vector superhero from Despicable Me. Normal people build cascades around dams for salmon. Once built these require zero maintenance.
- awjr 12y agoI think for specific situations this can be useful. In the final video they show a 'holding tank' the salmon eventually get to and are then hand transported through the building to the next body of water. I think it has been designed for a very specific commercial issue (maximising the restocking of wild salmon). I'm guessing this has applications elsewhere where you want to transport live fish/tubular slimy animals.
- SinFulNard 12y agoI feel like this was the highlight; http://gfycat.com/SophisticatedFarawayEthiopianwolf http://gfycat.com/SophisticatedFarawayEthiopianwolf
- Kiro 12y agoSophisticated Faraway Ethiopian Wolf?
- Terr_ 12y agoIt's an ID or hashcode, but in English words rather than hexadecimal. Easier for humans to recall, communicate, and error-check.
- ANTSANTS 12y agoAn utter bitch to type compared to a short string of garbage, though, and typing a URL manually (friend gives you a URL over the phone or in person) is the only case I can think of where the URL itself matters.
- vacri 12y agoOn mobile, perhaps, where you're pecking at a keyboard like a chicken, but with a keyboard it's easier to type.
- Sambdala 12y agoI find it the opposite to be honest, but probably only because I'm using swype on mobile. It's easy to hit random characters when touch typing on a full keyboard, but it's much easier to just swipe a couple words together in the url bar than it is to get the correct capitalization as well as having to hold down the key for about a second each time you need a number.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
- anon4 12y agoI've watched all the videos and I still can't understand how that thing can possibly work. They say it creates vacuum and transports things using atmospheric pressure, but both ends of the tube are open! What vacuum are they talking about? Is there a pump at one end sucking air? Am I looking at an elaborate prank?
- ekianjo 12y agoWatch the second video, You will see what they talk about. The first video is not clear at all.
- frandroid 12y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SDzJbhOVm0Q#t=14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SDzJ... Look at 0:14. This thing is put a little bit after the start of the pipe, creating a draft. The fish's own body becomes the "plug" that this air pump pushes up.
- anon4 12y ago@frandroid, @ekianjo Ok, I see. The "blower unit" was pretty easy to miss though, or maybe I'm just sleepy.
- tombrossman 12y agoI wonder how this affects the fish's slime coating, which is important to preserve. It seems like this would be rubbed off on the material as the fish is propelled along the tube, no?
- sjtrny 12y agoHow do they get the coating in the first place? They create it of course. I'm sure they can create more if this scrapes it away.
- tombrossman 12y agoThey can create more just as your body would create scar tissue if I scraped some of your skin off. Meanwhile, the exposed area is far more likely to become infected as your skin no longer protects it. Not a perfect analogy but it illustrates my point well enough.
- gnarbarian 12y agoBetter than them dying at the bottom of the damn dam.
- zizee 12y agoSince this is to help them on their final stage of their migration to the spawning grounds (after spawning they die), I don't think infection is a big issue.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoRight. At that point their lifespan is measured in days anyway.
- Gravityloss 12y agoNot all salmon die after spawning.
- 12y ago
- praptak 12y agoHere is a Cow Cannon, we can estimate its firing rate at 10 cows per second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sMXp6zCl8#t=205 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sMXp6zCl8#t=205
- dsirijus 12y agoIt's a good thing to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while.
- hudibras 12y agoThis is Hyperloop's MVP.
- fit2rule 12y agoYeah, I was just thinking it'd be great to have a human-scale version of this .. to get from one Soapy Land to another, perhaps?
- stock_toaster 12y agoIt reminded me of the travel tubes in futurama, but for fish.
- morganm 12y agoI recently watched DamNation [1] and was quite surprised at the shear number of dams located in the United States. The film claims that most have outlived their purpose. I can't recall the exact cost stated per fish to divert them around dams or raise them in a hatchery, but it was fairly high. The film's production quality was quite high and was fairly eye opening. While doing a little googling, I found an article [2] claiming $7 million in fish ladder work after structural damage forced a reduction in water level. So perhaps this solution could be cost effective or quickly put in place in case damage occurs just before a run. [1] http://damnationfilm.com/ http://damnationfilm.com/ [2] http://www.columbian.com/news/2014/apr/12/crack-in-dam-forces-costly-fish-ladder-work/ http://www.columbian.com/news/2014/apr/12/crack-in-dam-force...
- stevenrace 12y agoPer this comment, I checked out 'DamNation'. It was fascinating, thanks for the recommendation. The number quoted as $9,000/'Snakeriver Sockeye' that made the 800 mile journey upstream to Redfish Lake, Idaho. In 1992, as they tell it, only one fish made it. But that apparently was the first year after the project began. Then again, only 243 made it 2011 [1]. Only ~1,500 made it back to Granite lake, which is 400 miles upstream [2]. So it's part of a larger problem in the area. So the $40million spent equates to 222 fish per year on average. I'm pretty sure the 'Fish Canon', however humane, can at least match the 1 fish every 36hrs rate of existing systems. It's also worth noting the US Army Corp of Engineers ship large numbers of juvenile fish downstream on barges. Collecting them with the 'Fish Cannon' and then shipping them on barges back upstream (or furthest upstream lock) is just a budget/politics problem not one of technology. [1] http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019705443_captivefish18m.html http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019705443_captivefis... [2] http://www.bpa.gov/news/newsroom/Pages/Snake-River-sockeye-continue-upward-trend-in-2011.aspx http://www.bpa.gov/news/newsroom/Pages/Snake-River-sockeye-c...
- Fragment 12y agoHow long before this is a Minecraft mod?
- ASneakyFox 12y agoThis would be crazy if fish start to understand the cannon. Use it on their own and then continue on to find their destination (rather than be totally lost and confused)
- timje1 12y agoUnless I'm mistaken, the fish head upstream to die. None of them will encounter the cannon twice, unless the same river has multiple dams on it.
- JumpCrisscross 12y agoSimilar to how the salmon "learned" to swim back to where they were born, the increased survival frequency of salmon who can efficiently negotiate such a cannon would be expected to change the population.
- bencollier49 12y agoBut Epigenetics.
- MrBuddyCasino 12y agoOr unless they jump from the damn just to be able to ride the tube again. And again. Wheee!
- arethuza 12y agoTransferring live fish by pipeline has been used in the fishing industry for a long time - large trawlers will store fish in salt water in tanks and when they get into port they are transferred by pipeline directly from the trawler to the fish processing plant so they are still alive when they hit the table where they are "processed". [NB A fisherman explained this to me in Mallaig Scotland, none of the fishing boats I've been on were so high tech!]
- Gracana 12y agoI wonder if the tech is any different. If the fish are going to be slaughtered shortly, then it wouldn't matter (ethics aside) if they're a little hurt in the process, provided the meat isn't damaged, whereas here it is quite important that the fish remain unharmed.
- jevgeni 12y agoI'm happy to live in these times.
- limaoscarjuliet 12y agoReminds me of Chatham Island black robin conservation efforts that turned out not so good: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0079066 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... Conservation management often focuses on counteracting the adverse effects of human activities on threatened populations. However, conservation measures may unintentionally relax selection by allowing the ‘survival of the not-so-fit’, increasing the risk of fixation of maladaptive traits. Here, we report such a case in the critically-endangered Chatham Island black robin (Petroica traversi) which, in 1980, was reduced to a single breeding pair. Following this bottleneck, some females were observed to lay eggs on the rims of their nests. Rim eggs left in place always failed to hatch. To expedite population recovery, rim eggs were repositioned inside nests, yielding viable hatchlings. Repositioning resulted in rapid growth of the black robin population, but by 1989 over 50% of all females were laying rim eggs. We used an exceptional, species-wide pedigree to consider both recessive and dominant models of inheritance over all plausible founder genotype combinations at a biallelic and possibly sex-linked locus. The pattern of rim laying is best fitted as an autosomal dominant Mendelian trait. Using a phenotype permutation test we could also reject the null hypothesis of non-heritability for this trait in favour of our best-fitting model of heritability. Data collected after intervention ceased shows that the frequency of rim laying has strongly declined, and that this trait is maladaptive. This episode yields an important lesson for conservation biology: fixation of maladaptive traits could render small threatened populations completely dependent on humans for reproduction, irreversibly compromising the long term viability of populations humanity seeks to conserve
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wdewind 12y agoThis sounds like a success story to me, not a failure, despite the unintended consequences. I feel like the stories not finished though. Was the population able to survive without humans going forward? Or has it entirely died? Or something in between?
- bayesianhorse 12y agoI think the lesson should be: If a species is hovering over the brink of extinction, it's a better idea to do whatever it takes and only worry about the consequences later... Of course, if rim-laying had been fixated, the species would still have become extinct...
- gipp 12y agoHow do they get back down?
- jws 12y agoThey don't. For salmon it is spawn and die. Their fry will come back down with the water.
- cwal37 12y agoIf you're interested in the current state of the US hydropower generation, potential resource out there, and really most everything around hydropower in the USA, check out the NHAAP website. http://nhaap.ornl.gov/ http://nhaap.ornl.gov/ NHAAP is the National Hydropower Asset Assessment Program, and it's put together a large chunk of the groundwork for the DOE's hydropower vision project. http://energy.gov/eere/water/new-vision-united-states-hydropower http://energy.gov/eere/water/new-vision-united-states-hydrop...
- alexissantos 12y agoIn 20 Million Years... "Our ancestors traveled the beige tube to new waters, while the two-legged creatures watched and guided them."
- Terr_ 12y agoOld waters. They return the waters of their birth. Also, the storytellers die before their audience hatches...
- chrisBob 12y agoWhat attracts the fish to the tube? The ladders work by providing some water that is going down stream slowly it is an obvious path. If there is no water to swim upstream against I don't understand why a fish would enter a random tube.
- XaspR8d 12y agoAt about 88 secs in the second video[1] they show the inside of some sort of "trap" for the fish where water flows rapidly over a grate (and claim "volitional entry"). But I agree it's still an open question whether you could mitigate the fish's behavior effectively. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSBS2F9VXaE#t=88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSBS2F9VXaE#t=88
- scott_karana 12y agoThe second video makes it look like there's a downwards "slip and slide", and then the water gets vented out of the tube. If I interpreted it right, there would indeed be an obvious (gentle) downstream. :-)
- micro_cam 12y agoSalmon will swim towards turbulence (as part of a simple navigational strategy) so you can get them to swim into something using that. However, as with fish ladders, I expect it isn't 100% effective. Source: my dad has built some fish hatchery equipment including volitional entry devices.
- ErikRogneby 12y agoThis is a huge improvement on trucking them around the dams when the reservoirs are too low for the fish ladders.
- freejack 12y agoI've just finished listening to a radio interview where the guest asserted that technology and innovation is solely the domain of young white males focused on social networking problems to make money for the benefit of investors. I am so happy to have seen this on the heels of such a terrible interview. And I love the thinking that went into this invention. I really appreciate the novel approach although I can't help but wonder how they've dealt with the issue of friction and how that might affect the fish - I imagine that there's a fair amount of heat created over such a long run, even at the relatively low speeds described in the videos.
- davidgerard 12y agoScience article headline of the year.