Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/593

 SALMON "569 are able to make by their powerful and active muscles, and especially by the strong and fleshy tail. Ascending the rivers from June to Sep- tember, their shoals are attended by porpoises, seals, and carnivorous fish, which find them an easy prey ; it is popularly believed that they return to the river in which they were hatched, which in their immense numbers would be likely to happen to some, but more unlikely, as the fact proves, to the greater portion. The salmon is very voracious, and grows rapidly ; in the sea it feeds principally on small fishes, especially the sand eel (ammodytes), crusta- ceans, the ova of echinoderms, &c. ; it is be- lieved that it eats very little while in fresh water from its thin appearance, but the ema- ciation would be sufficiently accounted for by the waste incidental to the breeding season. In the sea salmon very rarely bite at a hook, but in rivers and estuaries they will rise to artificial flies. For an interesting account of salmon fly fishing the reader is referred to Sir Humphry Davy's " Salmonia, or the Days of Fly Fishing." They are speared by the Amer- ican Indians, and also in the Scottish rivers. Where salmon fishing is pursued as a business, they are taken in nets, usually in gill nets, stretched across the mouths of the rivers. Many hundred salmon of good size are often taken at a single haul of a seine, and some of the English fisheries furnish annually more than 200,000; the fisheries of Scotland and Norway are also very profitable. Eivers are let out to sportsmen with the exclusive right of fishing for salmon ; the streams of the Brit- ish provinces in America are frequently thus disposed of both to native and foreign anglers. The river Thames was once celebrated for its salmon, but its stream is now too impure to invite them to enter. The Merrimack river in Massachusetts formerly swarmed with salmon weighing from 9 to 12 Ibs., but the numerous dams and manufacturing establishments have driven them away, and the northern markets are now supplied from the Kennebec river and the British provinces, and from the Pacific coast. The salmon enters the rivers of Nova Scotia in the latter part of April, the rivers emptying into the bay of Fundy a month later, and those emptying into the gulf of St. Law- rence in June ; the females arrive first, and the males about a month after, and the grilse ascend during July and August. They spawn late in autumn, most of them returning to the sea before the rivers are frozen over, but some remaining in fresh water all winter and going to the sea in the spring; the ova are cast when the water is at most at 42 F., in shal- low, pure, and rapid streams. Among the noted rivers for fly fishing are the Gold and St. Mary's in Nova Scotia, and the S. W. Miramichi and Nepisiguit in New Brunswick. The flesh is exceedingly delicate, and of a tint of pink which has received therefrom the name of salmon-colored ; the delicacy of the flesh is no doubt due to the ova of echino- derms and crustaceans which form their chief food, and the intensity of the red color seems to be in proportion to the quantity of the gam- marine (minute amphipod crustaceans) which they devour. As with all fish which swim near the surface, it should be eaten when fresh, as the flavor is rapidly lost after death. The salmon is one of the fish to which the attention of pisciculturists has been directed, from the ease with which artificial fecunda- tion is effected, the successful results obtained, and the value as food. In the Penobscot riv- er in November, 1871, the Russian method of fecundation, that of carefully keeping the eggs and milt from water until they have come in contact, was practised with such success that 96 per cent, of the eggs were fecundated, a very much larger proportion than in the nat- ural operation ; 70,000 eggs from 10 females, thus fertilized, were sent in December to oth- er parts of Maine, Massachusetts, and Connec- ticut. From the ninth annual report of the commissioners of fisheries of Massachusetts, for the year ending Jan. 1, 1875, it appears that their chief work consisted in hatching the eggs and planting the young of the Cali- fornia and Maine salmon ; a few landlocked salmon from Sebec were also distributed to different parts of the state. Salmon eggs have also been carried from Scotland to New Zea- land. The S. hamatus (Cuv.), regarded by Bloch and other naturalists as the old male of the preceding species, has the back reddish gray, the sides brighter, and lower parts dull white ; there are black spots above the late- ral line, and some red markings, and the fins are bordered with blackish ; the lower jaw in both sexes and in the young has a terminal hook turned upward and received in a depres- sion near the union of the intermaxillaries ; the mouth is very large from the elongation of the jaw s^ and is armed with strong teeth. The true salmon enters the rivers in summer, but this species ascends between October and the end of February, so that the two are not found together except at the end of the fishing sea- son ; the flesh is lighter colored and drier than in S. salar, and is hence less esteemed ; it is found in the rivers of western Europe, but a specimen so named by Agassiz was caught in 1860 in the Merrimack river, showing that species which generally leave their arctic re- treats for the European shore sometimes de- scend on the American coast. In the S. TiucTio (Val.), the salmon of the Danube, the body is longer and rounder than in the common sal- mon ; it is grayish approaching to violet on the back, silvery white on the sides and below, the head and dorsals with a greenish tint, and the other fins yellowish ; above the lateral line are black spots, smallest in the largest fish ; as in other salmons, the young have seven or eight dark vertical bands on the body, which disappear with age ; it attains a weight of 80 or 40 Ibs., and is not found in the rivers open- ing into the Baltic; the flesh is white, but