How Does a Fish Ladder Work? w/ Jim Turek

Jim Turek, a restoration ecologist, is the fishway expert at NOAA’s Fisheries Restoration Center in Narragansett, Rhode Island. To celebrate World Migratory Fish Day (May 21, 2022) here's a video where he takes us on a tour of the fishway he helped design and build on the Pawcatuck River at Horseshoe Falls Dam in the village of Shannock, Rhode Island. It’s a Denil type fishway, which means it does its work with a gently sloped trough lined with symmetrical wooden baffles, and it was built in 2012 as part of an ongoing campaign to restore fish passage throughout the Wood-Pawcatuck river system. This fishway is particularly elaborate because of it's height and also because there is a separate eel pass built into it.
It’s amazing how much goes into a fish ladder or fishway...water velocity, resting pools, flow attraction, burst speed. What are the abilities of the kinds of fish you want to pass? How do you keep it going when the river level varies? How do the baby herring get down stream safely? What about eels? But if successful, an fishway can pass over 80% of the river herring that reach its entrance.
To hear Jim talk about the fishways he helps design and build, he’s clearly passionate about fish and maximizing healthy fish habitat for all the benefits (ecological and economic) that come with it.
Thanks to Jim for his time and to Bill McCusker of Friends of the Saugatucket for his footage of herring under water. The paintings of herring species and an eel come from “Inland Fisheries of Rhode Island” by Alan Libby, illustrations by Robert Jon Golder, published by RI Dept. of Environmental Management Division of Fish and Wildlife in 2013 with support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wildlife and Sportfish Restoration Program. It is available through RIDEM.

[@PirateOwl]

My family got quite a good chuckle out of the intro to this video 😂 Looks very ef-fish-ent.... :)

[@ggoldggirl]

"grand-mac-daddy of fish ladders" really got me

[@dr_greg_mouse4125]

Good people doing good work. Cheers!

[@bbbonesss]

Well done. Thanks for the great content!

[@freiherrvonstein]

Very informative. Thanks. I want to convert this diversion ditch into pools and connect then via a ditch ladder simulating what I find in the wild to create a refuge for the native wild brook trout above the agricultural runoff……. I was shocked to become aware…. Can someone please tell me the maximum height a brookie can jump between pools? I can over summer them through drought with deep trench swales from hillside springs in the fields

[@rinaturalhistory]

I found a paper online that experimented with this. According to them, wild brookies cannot jump very far, well under a foot. There's a sweet spot for fish size, too, with larger ones that could theoretically jump higher being less likely to colonize new habitat and smaller ones that like to push up into newly opened reaches being less good at jumping. I wouldn't count on brook trout getting past a hop of more than 3" to 6".

[@rajanthiyagarajan3494]

Don’t talk, show the actual ladder

[@rinaturalhistory]

Thanks for your suggestion for improving the video. Views of the fish ladder as a whole appear at the 51 second mark. The idea there was to show the whole thing and convey that it's a pretty big, elaborate structure. Various views of the fish ladder and its components feature between the 4 minute and 14 minute marks while Jim explains. One goal of these videos is to give a glimpse into the science behind things we see every day, like fish ladders. If you're interested in more views of fish ladders, do an image search and let the audio from our video play in the background while you browse the numerous fish ladder pictures available there. You might also be interested in a video we did at the herring run at the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace ruclips.net/video/OwcjBBlln9M/видео.html