410 American Fisheries Society 



DESTRUCTION OF SALMON BY NATURAL ENEMIES 



Much has been said and written by various persons regard- 

 ing the destructive tendencies of some animals that naturally 

 prey upon the salmon for food. Among the enemies thus 

 charged with responsibility for the decrease in the numbers of 

 red salmon are eagles, gulls and bears. Under the terms of a 

 law placing a bounty on eagles, some 15,000 have been 

 slaughtered in Alaska during the past four years. It is possible 

 that these birds take occasional toll of the living fish during the 

 migration, but it is certainly infrequent and constitutes in total 

 an altogether insignificant factor in proportion to the number 

 of migrating salmon and the number destroyed by other 

 means. The gulls pick out the eyes of salmon thrown on the 

 bank by fishermen or of spawned-out fish floating about or 

 cast upon the shore. They also sometimes dig into the body 

 of dead fish to get the liver or such eggs as may not have been 

 discharged. Of course, it is possible that under peculiar cir- 

 cumstances they may attack living salmon but ordinarily any 

 such action is impossible. In any event they exercise no ap- 

 preciable influence on the situation. 



The depredations of the bears are more significant. As I 

 have described elsewhere (Ward, 1919) their behavior when 

 feeding on salmon at the spawning grounds, that element in 

 the situation may be summarized briefly here. The bears there 

 catch and eat chiefly if not solely the spawned-out and dead 

 fish which are floating in the stream or are thrown on the 

 shores, and they do not molest appreciably the spawning fish. 

 Perhaps this condition is modified by food scarcity such as 

 would be associated evidently with a very scanty run of fish, 

 but I have no evidence of any kind to support such a view. 



Where the salmon run up small streams or where the 

 water is shallow and conditions favorable, a bear may indulge 

 in the sport of tossing the active fish out on the bank and have 

 a good many fish distributed over the scenery so that it looks 

 as if the destruction wrought had been considerable. From an 

 individual standpoint it evidently is, and no observer can help 



