Title:

The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog

Author:

Carly Anne York

Category:

Non-fiction

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

January 4, 2026

greatly enjoyed reading The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog - and Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science. My only complaint with this book is its length - it is too short at just 227 pages. I am certain that the author could have doubled the amount of material without exhausting the supply of stories of "silly science". This book was written because York, a scientist herself, was studying squid biomechanics and sensory physiology, when a lunch companion asked her why she bothered with such useless research. York was flummoxed by the question - it was self-evident to her that learning things simply for the fact of knowing how something worked was valuable in itself. Sometimes these oddball research projects yielded insights that led to valuable breakthroughs. This book is her answer to the question of "why do such pointless research?" It is because you never know what you will find.

The book is full of short narratives describing a curious individual looking at something unexpected and deciding to investigate further. For example, in 1966, a microbiologist named Thomas Brock was vacationing in Yellowstone and observed that algae thrived in the boiling hot thermal pools. Normally enzymes and proteins will disintegrate at temperatures above 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet Brock isolated a new bacterium that could tolerate temperatures as high at 158 degrees. A couple of decades later, scientists were stumped on how to replicate a few strands of DNA into large enough quantities that it could be tested (for example, in forensics). The problem was that copying DNA needed heat to separate the strands, and heat destroyed the polymerase enzymes used to replicate the DNA sample. A biochemist named Kary Mullis recalled reading about Brock's research, and in the 1980s realized he could use the enzymes from the thermal-tolerant Yellowstone algae to run the PCR (polymerase chain reaction). The result was an explosion of scientific research, including the mapping of the human genome, and innumerable studies into diseases and genetic defects.

The "Salmon Cannon" of the book title discusses the problem of dams blocking salmon from swimming back upstream to return to their spawning grounds. Fish ladders are ignored by most of the fish, and the water that runs through those fish ladders could have been used for power generation or irrigation. One observer remembered how banks used to pass documents through pneumatic tubes, and he wondered if fish could be propelled through similar structures, launching them up and over dams. It turns out that the answer is yes. The launch tube apparently does not harm the fish. Modifications have been made so that the cannon can identify the species of fish that swims into the tube - if it is an invasive species, such as an Asian carp, the fish cannon can redirect the fish into a holding bin, removing it from the environment.

Horseshoe crabs have blue blood because it is copper based (our blood is red because it is iron based). Horseshoes crabs are ancient, they have been around for 450 million years, well before the dinosaurs appeared. Their primitive circulatory system is susceptible to infections because blood and lymph slosh through sinuses open to the environment. Yet horseshoe crabs thrive in bacteria rich environments. Someone notice that the clotting agents in the blood of horseshoe crabs is extraordinarily sensitive to toxins - if even the slightest foreign particle enters their bloodstream, clots aggressively form around the intruding agent. Humans have a problem when generating medicines or vaccines - how to detect if there has been any contamination in a batch of drugs? It turns out that the sensitive horseshoe crab blood can be used to detect if there are any endotoxins nearby. Now the need for horseshoe crabs is so great that scientists are pondering how to prevent overharvesting of this suddenly valuable species.

The book is full of similar stories. How did the study of gila monsters lead to the GLP weight-loss drugs? Mold in a petri dish led to the discovery of penicillin. Ferrets were trained to drag swabs through giant contaminated magnets at particle accelerators. Studying the dance of honeybees lead to ideas about distribution of server resources in networks. Rats are trained to detect land mines. Bumps on a humpback whale's flippers lead to discoveries in turbulence and lift (expect to see bumps on the underside of airplane wings in the future). I enjoy reading about stories like this. If these examples are intriguing to you, I bet you will also enjoy reading this book.

At the end of The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog, York laments how much federal funding has been cut. The book was published in 2025, so it came out before the massive gutting of science by Musk and his DOGE cronies. If York thought federal backing of basic research was too small prior to 2025, then she must be aghast at what has happened since. We will never know what discoveries are missed, what opportunities are lost, because America has turned its back on basic science research.