THE INNOVATORS
Whooshh’s Innovative Fish Passage How Emrgy Water, is Disrupting Solution—Save Save Fishthe
Hydropower Industry
F
ish passage requirements can pose a challenge to dam owners and operators, including irrigation districts. Traditional fish passage installations like fish ladders can require a significant amount of time and money to install. To solve this problem, Whooshh Innovations has created a portable, modular, and technologically advanced fish passage system that accelerates fish through a tube up and over a dam in seconds. Its more advanced models can also scan the fish that pass through them and record their size, species, and other characteristics. In this interview, Michael Messina, Whooshh Innovations’ director of market development and business affairs, speaks with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about Whooshh Innovations’ fish passage technology and how it stands to benefit irrigation districts, dam owners, and the natural world.
A fish is moved by pneumatic pressure through a soft, flexible tube.
company’s founder, Vince Bryan, wound up pivoting toward developing the technology for moving live fish safely and efficiently over barriers like dams and saving water in the process. Joshua Dill: What problems were Whooshh’s fish passage products introduced to solve?
Mike Messina: The company has its roots in agriculture, interestingly enough. The technology was first developed to mechanically and automatically harvest tree fruit without damaging it. There were a couple of aha moments that helped underscore the need for this technology. A few years back, Whooshh employees were testing the agricultural equipment in orchards in Washington State and saw helicopters flying overhead with buckets. When they asked what the helicopters were doing, they were told that they were moving fish over the dam. The Whooshh employees knew that there must be a better way. The other aha moment came when Whooshh employees visited a citrus orchard two summers in a row. During the second summer, everything was dying because the water had been redirected due to conservation requirements. Based on these and other factors, our
Mike Messina: It solves a trifecta of problems. From the water resources benefit, a fish ladder requires 5–10 percent of the water that moves down a river or canal. Our system uses very little water. That means there is 5–10 percent more water that can be put toward irrigation or hydropower. On the environmental front, if fish migrating upriver encounter a dam or similar barrier that does not have a fish passage method, they can’t get to their spawning ground. Fish ladders and trap-and-haul operations are alternate methods of fish passage, but they’re difficult and stressful. Each fish, on average, carries 3,500–4,500 eggs, and it can be exhausting for them to spend many hours going up a fish ladder. Our product, by contrast, moves them over the dam in a 10-second glide. The more fish you can move upriver, the more successful spawning takes place. Finally, our systems are more
30 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Joshua Dill: Would you give us a basic idea of how the product works? Mike Messina: Our more advanced systems are fully automated and do not require any personnel. When fish swim into them, they trigger a sensor and the system wakes up, much as a laptop wakes up when you touch the keyboard. The fish slides in and is scanned. In about half a second, 18 rapid-fire images of it are taken. Based on these images, the system makes quick measurements of the length and girth of the fish and makes a sorting decision based on the measurements. The fish is sorted into a specific lane and accelerated into a soft, flexible tube, which is made of proprietary material that is misted every
PHOTOS COURTESY OF WHOOSHH INNOVATIONS.
Joshua Dill: Tell us about Whooshh as a company.
affordable for operators. They are modular and portable and typically cost 60–80 percent less than a fish ladder or a trap-and-haul operation. They are easy to install, which saves time as well as money. In our generation, we’ve seen technology advance quickly, but the technology for moving fish over dams or barriers has remained stagnant. Fish ladders or trucks are still being used just as they were 60 years ago. The technology is here, and it’s time we apply it to this process in a way that will benefit the natural world.
