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The Nihilistic Euphoria of the Fish Tube
From https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-nihilistic-euphoria-of-the-fish-tube
The Nihilistic Euphoria of the Fish Tube
By Rachel Riederer
August 15, 2019
The fish tube, made by a company called Whooshh, is designed to move aquatic creatures around dams, but watching it in action can raise existential questions.
Photograph Courtesy Whooshh Innovations
In a video that went viral over the weekend, a man in a bright-yellow rubber suit, standing chest-deep in the Columbia River, in Washington State, grabs a hefty salmon from the water and loads the fish into a chute. The fish suddenly shoots upward, through a rubbery, translucent sleeve—the “fish tube,” as the Internet decided to call it, which is a contraption that evokes a rollercoaster and a luge, if those things were constructed out of a slippery, rubbery material, kind of like the silicon used to make nonstick cookware. You see the fish’s silhouette wagging along against a desert-mountain backdrop, as if it were still swimming—but now it’s in the sky, over the dam, barrelling back down, and then splash, back into the water. The narrative arc, in one minute flat.
The video dates back to 2014, but it got new life when it was tweeted by the news-streaming platform Cheddar, on August 7th. It inspired Twitter poetry and song-lyric revisions (Coldplay and Robyn work well, in meter and mood) and provided an outlet for ogling and awe. For a couple of days, Twitter could not stop thinking about the fish tube or imagining what the voyage must be like for the cannoned salmon. Some have cast it as a jaunty adventure, as when set to the theme song from “DuckTales,” but others have conjured it as an aquatic trauma. As the writer and editor Tyler Coates tweeted, “imagine if you were a fish and this shit happened to you.” The most compelling visions of the fish tube have a note of nihilistic euphoria, as in the rewritten Smashing Pumpkins lyric “despite all my lube / i’m still just a fish in a tube,” or as crystallized by the cartoonist and illustrator Matt Lubchansky, who tweeted, “stick my disgusting body into that fish tube and fire me into the goddamned sun!!! let’s GO”
The maker of the fish tube, a Seattle-based company called Whooshh, calls it a “passage portal” and designed it to move fish and eels around dams. Entire ecosystems and fisheries can be disrupted when a dam blocks a river, creating a demand for creative solutions. Many dams have “fish ladders,” which divert water to spill over a set of concrete steps, where fish can pass through. Other methods of fish transport include fish elevators, which are just what they sound like, and collect-and-transport methods, in which fish are contained on one side of a dam and then driven around the obstacle in a truck.
Whooshh’s machinery moves the fish through a pneumatic tube; the tube is made with a flexible proprietary material and filled with mist, allowing for a “frictionless glide” to ease the fish’s passage. Mike Messina, a Whooshh representative, told me that the technology was originally designed as a way to transport apples from high branches without bruising. While field testing the devices, Messina said, the Whooshh team had “an ‘Aha!’ moment” when they kept seeing helicopters overhead that were moving fish over a nearby dam on the Columbia River—an especially dramatic version of the collect-and-transport strategy. The fish tube may appear outré to some, but, Messina said, “in the fish-passage business, nothing had changed for sixty or more years,” and it was due for some technological innovation. He portrays the passage portal as a gentler alternative to, say, the fish ladder, particularly for mothers-to-be: “Female salmon, with all those precious eggs—put them on a gentle glide and they have the energy to keep going.”
[...]
By Rachel Riederer
August 15, 2019
The fish tube, made by a company called Whooshh, is designed to move aquatic creatures around dams, but watching it in action can raise existential questions.
Photograph Courtesy Whooshh Innovations
In a video that went viral over the weekend, a man in a bright-yellow rubber suit, standing chest-deep in the Columbia River, in Washington State, grabs a hefty salmon from the water and loads the fish into a chute. The fish suddenly shoots upward, through a rubbery, translucent sleeve—the “fish tube,” as the Internet decided to call it, which is a contraption that evokes a rollercoaster and a luge, if those things were constructed out of a slippery, rubbery material, kind of like the silicon used to make nonstick cookware. You see the fish’s silhouette wagging along against a desert-mountain backdrop, as if it were still swimming—but now it’s in the sky, over the dam, barrelling back down, and then splash, back into the water. The narrative arc, in one minute flat.
The video dates back to 2014, but it got new life when it was tweeted by the news-streaming platform Cheddar, on August 7th. It inspired Twitter poetry and song-lyric revisions (Coldplay and Robyn work well, in meter and mood) and provided an outlet for ogling and awe. For a couple of days, Twitter could not stop thinking about the fish tube or imagining what the voyage must be like for the cannoned salmon. Some have cast it as a jaunty adventure, as when set to the theme song from “DuckTales,” but others have conjured it as an aquatic trauma. As the writer and editor Tyler Coates tweeted, “imagine if you were a fish and this shit happened to you.” The most compelling visions of the fish tube have a note of nihilistic euphoria, as in the rewritten Smashing Pumpkins lyric “despite all my lube / i’m still just a fish in a tube,” or as crystallized by the cartoonist and illustrator Matt Lubchansky, who tweeted, “stick my disgusting body into that fish tube and fire me into the goddamned sun!!! let’s GO”
The maker of the fish tube, a Seattle-based company called Whooshh, calls it a “passage portal” and designed it to move fish and eels around dams. Entire ecosystems and fisheries can be disrupted when a dam blocks a river, creating a demand for creative solutions. Many dams have “fish ladders,” which divert water to spill over a set of concrete steps, where fish can pass through. Other methods of fish transport include fish elevators, which are just what they sound like, and collect-and-transport methods, in which fish are contained on one side of a dam and then driven around the obstacle in a truck.
Whooshh’s machinery moves the fish through a pneumatic tube; the tube is made with a flexible proprietary material and filled with mist, allowing for a “frictionless glide” to ease the fish’s passage. Mike Messina, a Whooshh representative, told me that the technology was originally designed as a way to transport apples from high branches without bruising. While field testing the devices, Messina said, the Whooshh team had “an ‘Aha!’ moment” when they kept seeing helicopters overhead that were moving fish over a nearby dam on the Columbia River—an especially dramatic version of the collect-and-transport strategy. The fish tube may appear outré to some, but, Messina said, “in the fish-passage business, nothing had changed for sixty or more years,” and it was due for some technological innovation. He portrays the passage portal as a gentler alternative to, say, the fish ladder, particularly for mothers-to-be: “Female salmon, with all those precious eggs—put them on a gentle glide and they have the energy to keep going.”
[...]
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