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.