In the first three articles of this series, I argued that a more natural future for fish passage begins by restoring continuity, reducing stress, and embracing selective stewardship rather than indiscriminate movement. But a question continues to arise in conversations with Tribal leaders, fisheries managers, and regulators:
“If the PassagePortal moves fish around a dam, isn’t it just another form of trap-and-haul?”
At first glance, that may seem like a reasonable question. The answer, however, is no, and understanding why requires looking at fish passage from both a legal and biological perspective.
Trap-and-haul systems are exactly what their name suggests.
Fish are trapped. They are captured in a facility, concentrated in holding areas, handled by people, loaded into tanks or trucks, transported, and dumped back into a river at a different location. Even when performed carefully by experienced fisheries professionals, the process fundamentally interrupts the fish’s migration. Humans take control, determine when and where the fish moves. The fish is cargo.
The PassagePortal was designed from a completely different starting point. Fish encounter an attraction flow, they approach voluntarily, and they choose whether to enter, and when they do, they continue their migration immediately. There is no holding, no capture event, no containment period, no transport queue, and no truck waiting at the end of the journey. The fish remains an active participant in its migration from beginning to end.
The distinction matters!
Under fisheries management and ESA implementation, a “trap” is generally understood as a structure or device that captures, restrains, confines, or prevents a fish from freely continuing its movement without human intervention. A trap is “take” under ESA.
Trap-and-haul systems are built around that principle. Fish are intentionally collected and retained so that people can decide what happens next.
The PassagePortal functions differently. The solution was designed as a fish passage device for any high head dam, not a capture device below a dam. Fish are not retained, held and confined pending human action. The PassagePortal was specifically designed to avoid those conditions. Fish enter voluntarily and continue upstream immediately through the passage corridor.
From both an operational and biological perspective, it is more accurately described as volitional selective passage. Under ESA the PassagePortal does not meet the definition of a trap, rather it avoids the trap “take” presumption under ESA. Please try our free beta “take” tool to learn more.
In many conversations with Tribal representatives, I hear a recurring theme:
The concern is not simply whether fish arrive upstream. The concern is how they get there. For many Indigenous cultures throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond, salmon are not viewed merely as a resource. They are part of a living relationship that has existed since time immemorial. That relationship recognizes fish as migratory beings that possess agency within the ecosystem.
Trap-and-haul interrupts that agency. The fish is removed from the river, held, handled, transported, and eventually dumped back in the river. The migration becomes a shipping and handling process. The fish are mere objects to be moved. Whether necessary or not under certain circumstances, it is difficult to describe the experience as “natural”, even where “water to water” transfer is feasible.
The PassagePortal was built around preserving movement rather than replacing it. The fish continues migrating. The fish chooses to enter. The fish remains in motion. The fish completes the barrier crossing in seconds rather than hours or days. The journey remains recognizable as migration. The distinctions may seem inconsequential; however, they are often profoundly important to everyone who view fish passage through a cultural and ecological lens.
Some have argued that because modern trap-and-haul facilities can be used to selectively sort particular species, stocks, or conditions, the difference between those systems and the PassagePortal has narrowed. I do not believe that is true. Selectivity addresses which fish move. It does not address how they move.
A selectively operated trap-and-haul program still requires, capture, confinement, holding, sorting, handling, transportation, release. It’s a process with a lot of steps, takes time, and the process remains fundamentally human-directed.
The PassagePortal’s Fishl Recognition™ system approaches selectivity differently. Fish can be identified in real time at all times of day or night. Routing decisions can occur without nets, crowding, lifting, loading, heavy transport vehicles, oxygen tanks, and without interrupting migration. From the fish’s perspective, that distinction is enormous.
In Parts I, II, and III of this series, I suggested that we need to ask better questions about fish passage. This may be the most important one yet:
If a fish could choose, which journey would it take?
Would it choose Trap & Haul
Or would it choose the PassagePortal:
We may never know exactly how a fish would answer, but we can observe behavior in natural migration and fish consistently seek the most effective, safest, least costly route to their destination. That is how migration evolved and why they are capable of completing their remarkable life journey.
For decades, fish passage discussions have focused primarily on metrics. How many fish passed? How many survived? How quickly did they move past the obstacle? Safe, timely, effective those metrics remain important, but perhaps there is a better standard. Perhaps we should also ask: How closely does the passage experience resemble the migration nature intended?
The answer will never be perfect. A dam remains a barrier. Any passage system exists because a river has already been altered, but some solutions preserve more of the fish’s natural journey than others. Trap-and-haul was born from necessity. The PassagePortal was designed around continuity. One captures fish and transports them in a truck. The PassagePortal allows fish to keep migrating. That difference is not merely technical. It is biological, cultural, and increasingly, it may prove to be one of the most important distinctions in building a truly natural path forward.
A more natural future for fish passage is not about pretending dams do not exist or will come down soon. It is about minimizing the degree to which humans must intervene in migration.
The closer we can come to preserving choice, continuity, timing, and dignity in that journey, the closer we come to honoring both the fish and the communities that have depended upon them for generations. The goal was never simply to move fish, the goal is to let fish migrate, and there is a meaningful difference between the two.
Trap & Haul is fish handling to avoid an obstacle and interrupts migration. The PassagePortal is fish passage to overcome the obstacle and allows migration to continue uninterrupted.
By Vincent Bryan III, CEO & Founder, Whooshh Innovations Inc.
