194 T^he Life Story of the Fish 



given a numbered tag and released. Ninety-six days later it 

 was taken by an angler in the Northeast Margaree River. 

 Bonavista is alongside the Labrador current, and entirely 

 remote from any conceivable influence of the Margaree 

 River; but the fish had come home to spawn. And in 1943 

 two pink salmon which had been fin-marked in Morrison 

 Creek on Vancouver Island in the spring of 1942, and which 

 had been captured and tagged in the ocean earlier in 1943, 

 one at a point 45 miles to the north and one 115 miles to 

 the south, returned to Morrison Creek to spawn, and reached 

 the counting weir on the same day. These fish had not been 

 so far as the Atlantic salmon, but they had come through 

 strong tidal currents where any influence of their native 

 water must have been entirely obliterated. Little ground is 

 now left for the skeptics to stand on. 



To add further to the wonderment, of layman and scientist 

 alike, it has now been proved that the fish return to spawn 

 not only to the general river system where they grew up, 

 but to the exact identical small tributary stream. Steelhead 

 marked in Fall Creek near the Oregon-California line have 

 gone down the Klamath River to the Pacific (ocean life 

 showed clearly on their scales), and after three years have 

 re-entered the Klamath, swum up it 200 miles past the 

 mouths of numerous other tributaries until they came to 

 Fall Creek, and there turned off, just as you turn off the 

 highway when you get to the corner that leads to your 

 house, and entered it to spawn. This is hard to believe, but 

 it is true. It has been found to be true in other cases, where 

 salmon have come back not only to the same river but to 

 the same brook where they were born. And both Atlantic 

 salmon and steelhead have been known to enter the wrong 

 stream, make a brief stay there without spawning, and then 

 leave and go to the right one. 



This has been called the "parent stream theory." It is no 



