Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/53

Rh perhaps more exaggeration. I noticed that the Chilcoot fish seemed deeper in body than those at Chilcat. The red salmon becomes compressed before spawning, and the Chilcoot fishes having a short run spawn earlier than the Chilcat fishes, which have many miles to go, the water being perhaps warmer at the mouth of the river which flows farthest from the parent ice-fields. The riper fishes run up the shorter river. In Bristol Bay, according to Dr. Gilbert, the great runs ascend sometimes one river, sometimes another. Perhaps some localities may meet the nervous reactions of small fishes while not attracting the large ones. In Necker Bay a few full-grown salmon run besides the little ones. A few dwarf individuals, two and three year olds, ripened prematurely, run in every salmon stream. These little fishes are nearly all males. Mr. H. S. Davis well observes that 'until a constant difference has been demonstrated by a careful examination of large numbers of fish from each stream taken at the same time, but little weight can be attached to arguments of this nature.'

It is doubtless true as a general proposition that nearly all salmon return to the region in which they were spawned. Most of them apparently never go far away from the mouth of the stream or the bay into which it flows. It is true that salmon are occasionally taken well out at sea and it is certain that the red salmon runs of Puget Sound come from outside the Straits of Fuca. There is, however, evidence that most species rarely go so far as that. When seeking shore, they usually reach the original channels.

In 1880, the writer, studying the king salmon of the Columbia, used the following words, which he has not had occasion to change:

It is the prevailing impression that the salmon have some special instinct which leads them to return to spawn in the same spawning grounds where they were originally hatched. We fail to find any evidence of this in the case of the Pacific coast salmon, and we do not believe it to be true. It seems more probable that the young salmon hatched in any river mostly remain in the ocean within a radius of twenty, thirty or forty miles of its mouth. These, in their movement about in the ocean may come into contact with the cold waters of their parent rivers, or perhaps of any other river, at a considerable distance from the shore. In the case of the quinnat and the blueback, their 'instinct' seems to lead them to ascend these fresh waters, and in a majority of cases these waters will be those in which the fishes in question were originally spawned. Later in the season the growth of the reproductive organs leads them to approach the shore and search for fresh waters, and still the chances are that they may find the original stream. But undoubtedly many fall salmon ascend, or try to ascend, streams in which no salmon was ever hatched. In little brooks about Puget Sound, where the water is not three inches deep, are often found dead or dying salmon, which have entered them for the purpose of spawning. It is said of the Russian River and other California rivers, that their mouths, in the time of low water in summer, generally become entirely closed by sand-bars, and that the salmon, in their eagerness to ascend them, frequently fling themselves entirely out of water on the beach. But this does