Anadromous athletes that farm made into a global commodity
Salmon are commercially vital euryhaline fishes in genera Salmo and Oncorhynchus of family Salmonidae. Typically anadromous, they hatch in gravelly fresh headwaters, grow in rivers and lakes, then fatten at sea before returning to spawn. Norway leads farmed production.
Salmon is a common name, not a scientific one, covering seven commercially important species in two genera. Salmo holds the Atlantic salmon, which breeds in northern rivers on both sides of the ocean, alongside more than 40 species usually called trout, while Oncorhynchus has 12 species native only to the North Pacific. The word itself came through Anglo-Norman and Old French from Latin salmo, perhaps linked to salire, to leap; the silent l was a later Latinising addition. The fossil Eosalmo driftwoodensis from British Columbia shows that Atlantic and Pacific lines had not yet split 40 million years ago.
Each Pacific species has its own character. Chinook, also called king or spring salmon, is the biggest, often topping 1.8 metres and 14 kilograms. Chum has the widest range, from north of the Mackenzie River to south of the Sacramento. Coho, or silver salmon, reaches south to Monterey Bay. Pink salmon, nicknamed humpies in Alaska, is the smallest, and sockeye, known as red salmon, rears in lakes from the Canadian Arctic to the Klamath. Japan's masu, or cherry trout, has a landlocked form in a single Taiwanese stream, and landlocked Atlantic salmon live in lakes such as Sebago, Ladoga and Vanern.
Eggs hatch in cold gravel streams into alevins, which become striped parr and spend six months to three years at home before turning into silvery smolts whose chemistry adapts to salt water. After one to five years at sea, depending on species, they return mostly to their natal streams; an Atlantic fish back after a single year is called a grilse. Before spawning they darken and may grow humps, dog-like teeth or a hooked jaw called a kype, sometimes swimming hundreds of kilometres upstream. The female fans out a nest, or redd, that can hold 5,000 orange-red eggs across nearly three square metres.
Norway farms more salmon than any other nation, followed by Chile, and anglers prize them in fresh and salt water alike.
Source: Salmon
