The lifecycle of the salmon is the ultimate metaphor for sex and death.

The salmon spends the better part of its early life in rivers. They then swim out to sea where they live out their adult lives, before returning to the river to spawn. In order to do this, they have to swim upstream. Once they complete their journey, they have sex and die.

I feel like there’s a lesson in there for all of those “incels who can’t get a girl to sleep with them“.

Sadly, dams have impacted the salmons’ path to a happy ending.

From inundating spawning areas to changing historic river flow patterns and rising water temperatures, dams block the salmons’ passage between their spawning and rearing habitat and the ocean.

According to Mashable, fish transport developers Whooshh Innovations might have a solution – the ‘Salmon Cannon’.

“It’s a great tool that gives national attention to salmon,” said Sara LaBorde, the executive vice president of the Wild Salmon Center and former salmon recovery policymaker with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“Why would you need to transport salmon all that way?” asked LaBorde. “Because you’ve got all these darn dams in the way.”

The video below, which was recently shared again by self-described “futurist” Kash Sirinanda, shows an outdated version of the Salmon Cannon that requires people to feed the fish into a tube.

The updated version, which we’ll look into shortly, allows the fish to voluntarily swim onto a fish ladder, where they’re sorted before entering the tube.

Watch the video anyway to get an idea of how it all works:

This system helps native fish pass over dams in seconds rather than day pic.twitter.com/aAmhHArjPg

— Dr. Kash Sirinanda (@kashthefuturist) August 8, 2019

Research performed on the fish after their journey through the updated Salmon Cannon shows that the Salmon Cannon has the same or fewer effects than traditional and more time-consuming methods of transporting the fish.

When looking for damage to skin and reproductive health, as well as stress and immune responses, researchers didn’t find anything too significant. “The fish are in good enough condition to continue on their journey,” said Alison Colotelo, a senior research scientist at PNNL who studies the Salmon Cannon. “There are some impacts, but nothing that was alarming compared to how we normally move fish.”

The latest version of the Salmon Cannon works like this:

Whooshh plans to demonstrate the Salmon Cannon at Chief Joseph Dam in Washington in the near future.

Good news for keeping the species going, bad news for fish who wanted to take the scenic route on the way to their final destination.

The Upper Columbia United Tribes, made up of five native tribes, hope to reintroduce native salmon to this portion of the river — a river that once teemed with the fish. Some 80 years ago, the dams cut them off from the region. “Reintroduction of salmon will reconnect fish, people, and lands together — that is, restoring the health of the river and all life that depends on it,” the tribes wrote.

I’ll leave you with a more comedic take on the Salmon Cannon from Stephen Colbert:

[source:mashable]