the.com/fish ladder
A staircase for salmon, built so humans can dam rivers with a clean conscience.
means A series of ascending pools or steps built beside a dam or waterfall so migrating fish can swim and leap their way upstream to spawn.
from Straightforward compound English: 'fish' plus 'ladder,' coined descriptively once engineers started building the things, likely in the 1800s as dam-building accelerated across rivers salmon and other fish needed to climb. The earliest versions were simple notched channels diverting water into step-like pools — literally a ladder's rungs translated into water and concrete, no borrowed roots or hidden stories, just an apt name for an apt device.
- purpose
- lets fish bypass dams to spawn upstream
- design
- series of pools stepping up like stairs
- irony
- built to undo damage dams themselves caused
- fun fact
- some use underwater cameras to count migrants