guess you ’re a river herring , perchance about a metrical foot long , swimming gayly upstream when you suddenly stumble a giant concrete wall . How do you cross it ? Engineers are now designing new fishways disguise as broad , rocky pool that serve migrating fish make their way through dammed up rivers .
You have in all probability heard of fish ladders that already live — or “ narrow concrete , alloy , or woodwind contraptions that front a act like flood pedestrian main road overpasses , ” as Rebecca Kesslerputs it in her slice forYale Environment 360 . The hokey and frankly flaky - looking contraptions have some succeeder in getting Pisces through , but we could probably do better .
In Europe , engineer have been build more natural fishways , and it ’s enamour on in the U.S. , too . Kessler chat one such dam on the Pawcatuck River in Rhode Island , where large boulders had been cautiously direct to make with child puddle of urine that easy ramped up and over the dam . “ The new fishway looked downright moderately , much like a natural whoosh of river , albeit bound on one side by a gem retaining wall and ribbed by a rather neat serial of rapid , ” she writes .
And how does one plan a rude fishway ? By starting with a fake river . USGS ecologist Alex Haro use a 120 - foot - long hydraulic flume , essentially a mini research lab - sized river , to test unlike specie of Pisces the Fishes at unlike piss speeds and depths . A well - design fishway , he says , would be able-bodied to get fish through at a 94 percent success rate .
Fishways in river dams might be analogous tohighway crossing on land . After building out substructure all over country and water , we ’ve follow to actualize how utterly troubled massive pieces of concrete can be . So now we have substructure specifically organize for animal built on top of our subsist human substructure . [ Yale Environment 360 ]
Top image : A traditional Pisces the Fishes ladder viaCarsten Medom Madsen / Shutterstock
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