About

Fish Tube refers to a viral video of a "salmon cannon" developed by Whooshh that helps migrating salmon swim past dams in seconds rather than days. Once the video began spreading on Twitter, users joked about the strange contraption.

Origin

On August 7th, 2019, Cheddar^[1] tweeted a video of a "salmon cannon" in action. The "salmon cannon" is a product created by Whooshh,^[2] an environmentalist company which develops products to aid in fish passage. According to their website, they "are revolutionizing the world of fish passage with solutions that enable selective fish passage, accelerate recovery, restore natural habitat, and limit CO2."

Precursor

On November 9th, 2014, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ran a segment about Salmon Cannons (shown below).

Spread

On August 8th, Twitter user @KashtheFuturist tweeted the video, gaining over 40,000 retweets and 135,000 likes, as well as 20 million views.^[3] The tweet helped the video grow in popularity, as people such as Chrissy Teigen ^[4] and Hank Green^[5] posted it on their timelines. Twitter users jokingly expressed their desire to ride the fish tube. For example, Twitter user @jpbrammer^[6] joked "Yeet me through the fish tube" (shown below, left). Mark Hoppus^[7] tweeted "launch me through the fish tube so i can feel something" (shown below, right).

Others edited the video with different music to humorous effect. Twitter user Tuftecake edited it with music from Super Mario 64, gaining over 14,000 retweets and 36,000 likes (shown below, top). User @generativist posted the clip set to the Duck Tales theme, gaining over 3,300 retweets and 10,000 likes (shown below, bottom).

Various Examples

the salmon going through the giant fish tube: pic.twitter.com/UtIC7EKuc6

— Paul McCallion (@OrangePaulp) August 11, 2019

Search Interest

External References