MILTON-FREEWATER, Ore. – WhooshhTM Innovations has delivered a new fish transport system for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation on the Walla Walla river in Milton-Freewater, Oregon for their hatchery operations. Using the widely recognized and proprietary Whooshh Salmon Cannon TM technologies, it is configured to transport chinook salmon quickly and safely from a sorting table in a below ground vault at the rivers edge up to a waiting hatchery truck for transport to their hatchery operations, thereby assuring the salmon’s return in the years to come.

The Whooshh system delivered removes the need to hand carry the fish individually up the stairway from the vault, and creates a less stressful experience for the fish, as well as a safer working environment for the biologists.

The system is one of Whooshh Innovations live fish handling solutions, designed to make it easier and safer to move fish from one location to another.

Whooshh systems have been thoroughly evaluated on both wild and hatchery fish. Fish that have been transported through the Salmon Cannon are safe from typical handling injuries and with low stress the fish have been shown to survive through spawning as well as, or better than, traditional methods of fish handling.

Unlike the fish handling system described above, Whooshh Innovations has an array of other fish passage systems -- survival, passage, migration time, homing, disease transmission, and behavior of fish are all considered in our fish passage designs.  Fish passage systems are volitional, meaning the fish can swim in on their own, and some systems are able to integrate scanning and sorting and invasive species removal features in order to enable selective fish passage and compile data and imagery.