Fish Ladder: Is the 200-Year-Old Solution Still Good Enough for Today's Rivers?
The fish ladder is one of the oldest engineered solutions in natural resource management. The basic concept, a series of stepped pools creating a passable gradient for fish to swim upstream past a barrier, has been documented in various forms since the 17th century. The first modern fish ladder designs emerged in the 19th century in response to salmon population declines in European rivers, and the technology was adopted widely in North America as dam construction accelerated through the 20th century. At Whooshh Innovations, we have genuine respect for what the fish ladder represented as an innovation. It was a serious engineering response to a real ecological problem at a time when the alternatives were to either ignore the problem or remove the dam. Both of those are still options. But today there's a third option: technology that does what a fish ladder does, and more, with a smaller footprint, lower cost, and the data infrastructure that modern fisheries management requires. T...