134 American Fisheries Society 



Salmon are True to Native Rivers. 



I think that I am one of the few students of salmon life who 

 has never wavered in his view that Salmon are true to their native 

 rivers. Many eminent authorities firmly held the opposite view, 

 others held the opposite view but have been converted, and the 

 tendency now is to adopt the opinion which I have always 

 expounded and firmly held. My eminent friend and former 

 international colleague, Dr. David Starr Jordan, has consistently 

 questioned the opinion that salmon are unfailingly true to their 

 native rivers. "We fail," he said, "to find any evidence of this 

 in the case of the salmon of the Pacific coast, and we do not believe 

 it to be true. * * * They may come into contact with the 

 cold waters of their parent rivers, or perhaps of any other river, 

 at a considerable distance from the shore * * * in a majority 

 of cases these will be the waters in which the fishes in question 

 originally were spawned." Dr. C. H. Gilbert, after a prolonged 

 study of the Sockeye salmon, has fully adopted my view and has 

 very definitely pronounced the opinion that salmon return for 

 spawning, not only to the original river of their nativity, but to 

 the very spot where they were reared as fingerlings. In such 

 case their "homing tendency" is far more rigid in its workings 

 than has been suspected. My own statement, published twenty 

 years ago, and repeated in a second report in 1912, on the habits 

 of Canadian salmon was that, "Each river has its own race of 

 salmon," and in a paper before this Society in 1916,* I referred 

 to a small stream, or rather creek, which produced a race of Sock- 

 eyes whose flesh was as dark-colored as beef, and which in this 

 and other features, contrasted with the great schools passing 

 through the same estuarine waters to the Skeena river, a few miles 

 away. The Skeena salmon canners only netted this creek in an 

 emergency, when the Sockeye supply of the main river was 

 insufficient to fill the cans, the objection being that this small 

 creek produced only salmon having meat of the dark repulsive 

 color referred to. 



* "The Red Color of Salmon's Flesh, etc." Trans. Amer. Fisheries 

 Soc, XLVI, 1, Dec., 1916, p. 55. 



