When he created his online “fish doorbell” to aid fish migration in the Dutch city of Utrecht, never in his wildest dreams did ecologist Mark van Heukelum imagine that one day his project would end up being featured on an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
That’s exactly what happened this past Sunday, when Oliver dedicated a full ten-minutes of his show to van Heukelum’s creation, even enlisting R&B artist Mario to perform a love song aimed at helping the fish population of Utrecht get into the mood.
“I was laughing my head off,” van Heukelum told Dutch broadcaster NOS the day after Oliver’s piece aired. “It was bizarre and above all a very positive story.”
The piece also had an immediate effect on traffic to the fish doorbell website, where visitors can press a button if they see fish in live webcam video outside the Weerdsluis lock in Utrecht, which in turn alerts a lock keeper to open the lock to let the fish through.
According to Anna Nijs, an ecologist with Utrecht municipality, visitors to the site nearly quadrupled overnight, with the site logging between 600,000 and 700,000 visits in the 24 hours following Oliver’s broadcast.
“Of course, you don’t need that many people to actually let the fish through,” Nijs told NU.nl. “But we like to make as many people as possible aware of fish migration and the importance of fewer barriers that we as humans have erected.”
The underwater livestream can handle about 2000 visitors at a time. When that number is exceeded (as it was Sunday night in the wake of the fish doorbell’s star turn on Last Week Tonight) visitors are referred to the livestream on YouTube, where fish can be spotted, but viewers can not ‘ring the bell’ to have the lock opened.
Perhaps anticipating that they could crash the official fish doorbell, Last Week Tonight directed viewers to its own version of the doorbell at https://showmeyournetherlands.com/.
Van Heukelum told NOS that the show was in touch in him ahead of the broadcast, explaining “They wanted to fact-check things and I was sent a whole list of questions. The homework was done meticulously.”
