REPORT OF STATE BOARD OF FISH COMMISSIONERS. 99 



rapid stream near Nass River are more wiry than those of the neighboring 

 large stream. The same claim is made for the different streams of 

 Puget Sound, each one having its characteristic run. In all this there 

 is some truth and perhaps more exaggeration. I noticed that the Chil- 

 coot fish seemed deeper in body than those at Chilcat. The red salmon 

 becomes compressed before spawning, and the Chilcoot fishes having a 

 short run spawn earlier than the Clhilcat fishes, which have many miles 

 to go, the water being perhaps warmer at the mouth of the river which 

 flows farthest from the parent ice-fields. The riper fishes run up the 

 shorter river. In Bristol Bay, according to Dr. Gilbert, the great runs 

 ascend sometimes one river, sometimes another. Perhaps some localities 

 may meet the nervous reactions of small fishes while not attracting the 

 large ones. In Necker Bay a few full-grown salmon run besides the 

 little ones. A few dwarf individuals, two and three year olds, ripened 

 prematurely, run in every salmon stream. These little fishes are nearly 

 all males. Mr. H. S. Davis well observes that "until a constant differ- 

 ence has been demonstrated by a careful examination of large numbers 

 of fish from each stream taken a\ the same time, but little weight can 

 be attached to arguments of this nature." 



It is doubtless true as a general proposition that nearly all salmon 

 return to the region in which they were spawned. Most of them appar- 

 ently never go far away from the mouth of the stream or the bay into 

 which it flows. It is true that salmon are occasionally taken well out at 

 sea and it is certain that the red salmon runs of Puget Sound come from 

 outside the Straits of Fuca. There is, however, evidence that most 

 species rarely go so far as that. When seeking shore, they usually 

 reach the original channels. 



In 1880, the writer, studying the king salmon of the Columbia, used 

 the following words, which he has not had occasion to change : 



It is the prevailing iiiipref^sion that the salmon have some special instinct which 

 leads them to return to spawn in the same spawning grounds where they were originally 

 hatched. We fail to find any evidence of this in the case of the Pacific Coast salmon, 

 and we do not believe it to be true. It seems more probable that the young salmon 

 hatched in any river mostly remain in the ocean within a radius of twenty, thirty or 

 forty miles of its mouth. These, in their movement about in the ocean 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 the case of the quinnat and the blueback, 

 their "instinct" seems to lead them to ascend these fresh waters, and in a majority of 

 cases these waters will be those in which the fishes in question were originally spawned. 

 Later in the season the growth of the reproductive organs leads them to approach the 

 shore and search for fresh waters, and still the chances are that they may find the orig- 

 inal stream. But undoubtedly many fall salmon ascend, or try to ascend, streams in 

 which no salmon was ever hatched. In little brooks about Puget Sound, where the 

 water is not three inches deep, are often found dead or dying salmon, which have en- 

 tered them for the purpose of spawning. It is said of the Russian River and other Cali- 

 fornia rivers, that their mouths, in the time of low water in summer, generally become 

 entirely closed by sandbars, and that the salmon, in their eagerness to ascend them, 

 frequently fling themselves entirely out of water on the beach. But this does not prove 

 that the salmon are guided by a marvelous geographical instinct which leads them to 



