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What is a Salmon?

The more we find out about salmon, the more fascinating they become.

Salmon: It is hard to identify salmon by their names, because the scientists who first named salmon, trout and char weren't very systematic, and different rules were used in different places. Today, scientists are using genetic data to more accurately classify these fish. The family Salmonidae is now divided into three major groups: salmon (genus Oncorhynchus), trout (genus Salmo), and char (genus Salvelinus).

Pacific Salmon: There are seven species of ocean-going Pacific salmon in B.C.: sockeye, Oncorhynchus nerka; pink, O. gorbuscha; chum, O. keta; coho, O. kisutch; and chinook, O. tshawytscha; cut-throat trout, O. clarki and steelhead, O. mykiss. Three of these species have variants that are primarily freshwater fish: cut-throat trout, O clarki; rainbow trout and Kamloops trout, both variants of the same species, O. mykiss; and Kokanee, a variant of sockeye, O. nerka.

Two other species of Pacific salmon, masu, O. masou, and amago, O. rhodurus, are only found in Asian waters.

The genus Oncorhynchus, to which all these salmon belong, dates from at least the Pliocene era, six million years ago. Their current habitats in British Columbia date back to the last Ice Age.

Cut-throat trout.
Photo: Phil Edgell

Steelhead.
Photo: Phil Edgell

Migrations: Seven species of salmon native to B.C. are anadromous, hatching in fresh water and migrating to spend their adult lives in the northern Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean before returning, three to five years later, to spawn in their native rivers on the west coast of North America from California to Alaska, and in Asia from Russia to Japan and Korea.

Stocks: Each species of salmon in B.C. is made up of many stocks, or subgroups. Salmon that belong to different stocks can interbreed, but usually do not because of geographic or behavioural barriers; they migrate to different streams to spawn, or spawn in the same river in different seasons.

Atlantic Salmon: Pacific salmon also look very similar to Atlantic salmon, which is actually a trout. Unlike Atlantic salmon, Pacific salmon are semelparous, dying after they spawn. Pacific salmon are more closely related to each other than they are to their Atlantic salmon "cousin". Pacific and Atlantic salmon were restricted to their own oceans until they were transplanted here by people. Today, great numbers of captive Atlantic salmon are being raised in fish farms along B.C.'s coast.

Trout: Salmon look like trout, but differ from them as most trout spend their entire lives in fresh water.

Juvenile brown trout.
Photo: Finn Larsen

Brook trout.
Photo: Finn Larsen

Threats to Salmon: The spawning habitats of wild salmon stocks have been affected by logging, construction of dams, urban expansion, agricultural, industrial and urban populations and by competition from hatchery stocks. Habitats can also be lost through global warming and other phenomena that affect ocean survival.