Dummy Fish Taking the Fall for Salmon

Heard of crash test dummies? Now there’s a crash test salmon.

Engineers on Wednesday unveiled Flubber, a 6-inch rubbery replica of a young salmon, packed with wires and sensors.

The fake fish will spurt through the churning, 10-foot-long blades of the McNary hydropower dam on the Washington-Oregon border next month to measure how salmon are jostled, scraped and even killed on their treacherous journey downstream.

The synthetic salmon was developed at the Energy Department’s Richland, Wash., lab as part of a five-year, $8-million government effort to make hydroelectric dams more fish friendly.

Government scientists and some corporate partners want to use the Flubber data and studies of real salmon to make safer turbines.