136 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHEEIES 



together. His body becomes slab-sided, his fins thicken, and his skin is covered 

 witli slime, \mtil altogether he is but a disgusting caricature of the beautiful creature 

 that came in from the sea. 



Salmon run far upstream — for more than two hundred miles in the larger rivers 

 such as the St. John. SpawTiing, which occupies the fish from 5 to 12 days, takes 

 place in late October and early November in Penobscot and St. John waters; proba- 

 bly at the same time in Nova Scotian streams. Most of the spent fish — now 

 known as "kelts" — return at once to the sea after spawning, this being true of all 

 grilse kelts and of adult fish in small rivers. Probably most of the large salmon 

 that were formerly taken during the winter in Belle Isle Bay, about 30 miles above 

 the mouth of the St. John River at the head of tide, were kelts, for they have been 

 described*^ as improving in condition ^Tith the advance of the season on a bountiful 

 diet of small fish. Some nonbreeding fish seem also to have wintered there,*' how- 

 ever, held by the same attraction. In large rivers, however, some of the kelts 

 linger over ^vinter, taking little food but nevertheless improving somewhat in con- 

 dition, to go back to salt water (if they survive, which many of them do not, for 

 spa\\"ning leaves them verj' thin and exhausted) the follo's^'ing spring, when a few 

 such are caught among the sea-run fish that they pass on their way downstream. 

 None of these late kelts spawn the following autiunn; annual spawners are to be 

 sought among those that run down immediately after spawning and thus have time 

 to recuperate in the sea. Correspondingly it has been found that a far larger pro- 

 portion of the fish in small streams than in large are annual spawners. And here we 

 find one even if not the only reason for the well-known fact that sahnon invariably 

 average smaller in the former than in the latter, for kelts returning to the sea im- 

 mediately after spawning have less opportunity to grow (though they recover condi- 

 tion sufficiently to spawn again the follomng simimer) than such as await the 

 spring to go downstream, and that spend a whole year at sea instead of one winter 

 only between two successive spawnings. This, however, does not account for the 

 fact that it is almost invariably in large rivers that the very large maiden fish, four 

 or more years old, are taken, nor can we subscribe to the oft-advanced explanation 

 that smolts from large rivers wander farther out to sea than do those from small 

 ones and hence are longer in returning thence, for once in the salt water of the open 

 sea, salmon are subject to similar surroundings, irrespective of the size of their 

 parent streams. 



The distribution of the catch of salmon in the Gulf of Maine yields a glimpse of 

 the movements of the fish there. To begin with, so few are caught near Cape Sable 

 that there can be no general movement around the Cape by the fish that spawn in the 

 rivers of the outer coast of Nova Scotia. The precise locations where salmon are 

 taken in St. Mary Bay (16,400 pounds, or about 1,600 fish, in 1916-17) suggest 

 that the fish follow its southern and not its northern shore on their journeys in and 

 out.^" Statistics of much larger catches in the Bay of Fundy corroborate Hunts- 

 man's (1922a) suggestion that on leaving the rivers they follow the coast (New 



" Phair. Forest and Stream, Vol. XXX, 1888, p. 291. 

 " Harding, Jas. A. Ibid., Vol. XXXVI, Feb., 1891, p. 68. 

 " A few are also taken near the mouth of the Tusket. 



