They’re doing it on a large scale!
Wild video footage shows an airplane dumping thousands of fish from the air into remote Utah lakes to try to restock the bodies of water with marine life.
The footage, shared by the state’s Division of Wildlife Resources on Friday, shows crews filling a small aircraft with scores of “fingerlings,” or fish under the age of 1, before they’re dumped out of a chute into more than 200 high-elevation lakes in Utah.
“The fish are between 1-3 inches long, so they flutter down slowly to the water,” the agency said on Facebook.
The plane holds hundreds of pounds of water and can drop 35,000 fish in a single trip, the agency said.
Wildlife experts said the aerial dumps are a more effective method of stocking fish than transporting them by ground since it’s difficult to maintain the animals’ oxygen levels in packed tanks for long distances.
“Post-stocking netting surveys show that survival of aerial-stocked fish is incredibly high,” the agency said.