Company News

Dr. Jackson Gross has extensive experience and knowledge in dealing with nonindigenous Quagga mussels. He will present his research to the Interagency Quagga Mussel Group, lead by the National Park Service/Great Basin Institute, he is participating in a joint meeting with Lower Colorado River Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force. Quagga mussels are an invasive aquatic species that grows to about an inch in diameter. They reproduce quickly and in large numbers. They are filter...

Smith-Root’s most recent electrical barrier installation, Lower Gar Lake, was featured in the March/April issue of MUSKIE Magazine, the official publication of Muskies Inc. The impetus for this installation was the upstream migration of invasive carp but had the ancillary benefit of preventing the downstream migration of native muskies. According to the article, muskies have displayed sensitivity to the DC electrical fields present in electrical barriers and, based on their...

Through coordination with Iowa Department of Natural Resources and United States Army Corp of Engineers (USACE), Smith-Root has designed and installed an electrical fish barrier atop the dam at Lower Gar Lake. This barrier, powered by seven 1.5kVA pulsators, covers 165 feet in width and 3.2 feet in depth. Asian carp began appearing in this area after a 2011 flooding event on the Missouri River. This barrier will prevent further carp movement into the Iowa Great Lakes....

Smith-Root was recently contracted by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to complete an “Evaluation of a Non-Lethal, Graduated Fields of Pulsed DC to Guide Downstream Migrating Sea Lamprey Transformers” at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Hammond Bay Biological Center in Millersburg, MI. Sea lampreys are aquatic vertebrates native to the Atlantic Ocean. Sea lampreys resemble eels, but unlike eels, they feed on large fish. They can live in both salt and fresh water. Sea...

Electric guidance technology appears to represent an under-utilized and undiscovered technology among the hydropower management community. Although used for many different types of applications in fisheries management, there are just a few examples of Graduated Field Fish Barriers (GFFB)  at hydro facilities. Currently, 47 Graduated Field Fish Barriers (GFFB) are either in use or known to have been used around the world for fish guidance. Yet only three GFFB applications have...