History
Written reports of rough fishways date to 17th-century France, where bundles of branches were used to create steps in steep channels to bypass obstructions. A version was patented in 1837 by Richard McFarlan of Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada, who designed a fishway to bypass a dam at his water-powered lumber mill. In 1852–1854, the Ballisodare Fish Pass was built in County Sligo in Ireland to draw salmon into a river that had not supported a fishery. In 1880, the first fish ladder was built in Rhode Island, United States, on the Pawtuxet Falls Dam. The ladder was removed in 1924, when the City of Providence replaced the wood dam with a concrete one. Concrete ladders are not always an improvement – the electric field-sensitive organs of the paddlefish are overloaded in the proximity of the rebar and other metal used in concrete construction, preventing them from gaining access to their spawning grounds and contributing to a catastrophic decline in their numbers.
As the Industrial Age advanced, dams and other river obstructions became larger and more common, leading to the need for effective fish by-passes.
Read more about this topic: Fish Ladder
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)