Salmon Species Fishing Salmon Lesson Plans Salmon and Canadians All About Salmon |
Cool Salmon FactsThere are about 900 stocks of salmon in BC! In comparison, there are about 190 country nationalities in the world, almost five times less! Females lay thousands of eggs (usually between 2000-10,000). Less than 1% of these eggs survive to reproduce. So if one female had 2500 eggs, only 2 would survive to spawn. Chinook salmon can migrate 16,000 km through their North Pacific Ocean feeding grounds. That is four times the driving distance between Vancouver and Toronto. Salmon use smell to recognize their natal rivers, but it is still a mystery how they navigate there from the ocean. Try to smell your way back home. Good luck! The homing instinct is incredibly accurate---probably less than 0.1% of the population strays. How many times have you missed your bus stop or your highway exit to get home? More than 0.1% of the time? Probably! Salmon can migrate more than 3000 km upstream through freshwater to spawn. That is like driving halfway across Canada. Salmon often travel 50 km per day on their spawning journeys. This would be like running more than a marathon every day! Salmon spawn only once in their entire life! Salmon can jump up to 2 m to cross obstacles in rivers. That is about as high as a female Olympic athlete can jump. Salmon are very territorial. They compete for habitat and they also compete for mates showing all sorts of mating display behaviour. A jack is a small male that spawns after only one summer at sea! Jacks sneak into their streams to gain access to females. Hmmm... do you know anyone called Jack who is sneaky? A typical orca eats 25 kg of salmon a day. The 300 resident orcas
in BC probably consume 1000 tonnes of salmon per year! That is the
weight of 100 large trucks! |