70 KENDALL: NEW ENGLAND SALMONS. 



Nature tells them the right time has come, and not before. For instance, last February 

 (1923) the Wye was in continuous flood throughout the whole of the month, and yet in 

 March we caught just as many kelts as usual.' 



Dahl (1910, p. 38) wrote: 'The importance of the spawning journey as a factor of 

 destruction in the life of the salmon is shown more clearly when one takes into con- 

 sideration the number of fish whose scales show two "spawning marks." In the whole of 

 my material, which consist of 3,350 individuals, I have found only three specimens whose 

 scales showed two spawning marks, that is to say, only three individual fish, which had 

 survived the second spawning.' 



Hutton (1922) found that: 'of 883 salmon which returned to spawn a second time, 

 only 74 survived to spawn a third time, and came back with two spawning marks 

 on their scales, and of the 74 only two again survived and came back to the river with 

 three spawning marks on their scales. These two fish, if they had not been caught, 

 might have spawned a fourth time. 



'The proportions work out as follows: Deducting the 883 spawned fish from 11,455 — 

 the total number of scales examined — we are left with a net total of 10,572 maiden 

 fish. Out of these 883, 74 or 8.4 per cent (ca. .7 per cent of 10,572) survived to spawn a 

 third time, and only 2 out of the 74 or 2.7 per cent (.02 per cent of 10,572) again re- 

 turned to the river. 



'We can put these figures in a different way. 



'Out of every 10,572 salmon which enter the Wye — 



'9,689 will die after the first spawning. 



'809 " " " " second " 



72 " " " " third 



'2 fish will survive to spawn a fourth time.' 



'These figures show quite clearly that the arduous task of spawning has a most 

 serious effect in shortening the life of the salmon, for out of every 10,000 Wye salmon 

 which return to the river as maiden fish, over 9,000 spawn once then die, and of the few 

 hundreds which remain barely 2 (out of 10,000) will survive their third spawning 

 journey.' 



In connection with the figures pertaining to the long and short periods of migration 

 Hutton says that the figures show that the long period of migration is much more fatal 

 to the salmon than the short period. Apparently the fish which have suffered least 

 during the spawning operations are the only ones which sufficiently recovered after 

 spending only a few months in the sea, to face another spawning period, and which 

 therefore adopt the short period. Most of the long period fish die after spawning and of 

 the few which survive only a very small number recover sufficiently to be able to spawn 

 again, in the next ensuing season. In other words most of them adopt the long period 

 of migration before they again return to the river, 



Hutton attributes the greater mortahty in long-period fi^ to the fact that 'they 

 return to the river in the spring and do not spawn until the following autumn, so that 



