Behind the Fish Tube Video that Went Viral Over the Weekend

Seeing people squeeze a salmon through a long tube and watching the fish travel to its destination is one of those oddly satisfying sights on the Internet. Simply dubbed the Fish Tube, the video first posted in 2014 gained a lot of attention again over the weekend.

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.
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.

One cannot deny the fact that witnessing the fish's journey from one end of the tube to the other makes you think about it as a metaphor of the existential nature of life.

Yet is there not a strange peace to be found in surrendering to whatever chaos has plucked you from your personal mental river? A salmon in a tube can do nothing but relax while physics does the work; Messina told me that Whooshh can even slow the fish down at trip’s end, the better to insure a smooth splashdown.
Twitter-scrolling and life itself can sometimes feel akin to being throttled through some strange and endless pneumatic tube—would that all our journeys could resolve so gently.

(Image credit: Whooshh Innovations)


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