52 American Fisheries Society 



in the small fibrillae of the muscle fibres, and the same 

 bright-tinted matter occurs, later, in the eggs contained 

 in the ripe female ; but a transference of stored materials 

 must also take place in the male salmon,- the destination 

 being the spermaries. In the spermaries the red color, 

 however, is lacking, the organs are white, and the ripe 

 contents appear of an opaque, white, creamy color. The 

 purpose of the richly-colored, oily matter in the muscles 

 of the male would not appear, therefore, to be the build- 

 ing up of the white testes, though such might be the ex- 

 planation of the brilliant red contents of the ovaries. 



Other explanations, modifications of the foregoing, 

 have been propounded by various authorities, but all may 

 be summarized under the headings just set forth, viz : 



(1) Trophic, and due directly to the food ingested. 



(2) Vascular, or produced by the network of blood- 



vessels. 



(3) Incremental, or the reverse, and in the latter case 



evidence of an unwholesome, possibly patholog- 

 ical, condition of the fish. 



(4) Nutrimental or originating in the vigor and well- 



fed condition of the fish. 



(5) Sexual, a storage of fatty matters to meet the de- 



mands of reproduction. 



Current Views Erroneous. 



None of these are fully satisfactory; indeed there are 

 fatal objections to each and all of them. Some of these 

 objections I may here refer to. Thus there is no con- 

 clusive proof that the salmon feed exclusively, or even 

 mainly, on shrimps, lobsters, or other crustaceans, in 

 which red lipoid matter occurs abundantly. Many fish 

 with white flesh, or pale flesh, subsist more emphatically 

 on such food than the salmon. In the stomach of such 

 salmon as very occasionally have been captured in the 

 sea, there have been found herring, sand-eels, etc., and 

 any food found inside ascending salmon, in fresh water, 

 consisted of insects, worms and the like, food materials 

 which contain no rich abundance of such coloring matter 





