HOW DOES THE SALMON KNOW?

Salmon spend most of their life in the sea swimming and eating all sort of small fish, but when they are three and a half or four years old they start a journey across the sea to reach the rivers to lay their eggs. Salmon are helped generally by tides at the start of their journey but then, they have to fight their way against strong currents to go further upstream, leap up weirs and rapids and even give up feeding in order to find safe places for laying their eggs.

During running, their skins loose the beautiful silver colour turning into reddish- brown and spotty and losing their graceful shape.

Most of the time a Salmon lay on a gravel river bed. The mother first digs a shallow trench with her tail to hold them. She lays only few at a time, cover them with some gravel and moves further upstream to lay the next lot. Altogether a large Salmon might lay about 30,000 eggs, taking a week or two to lay and hide them.

SALMON DOING A MIGHTY LEAP

Salmon are quite exhausted and very thin and weak at the end of spawning, some of them die of injuries or starvation, and others are caught by otters, bears and poachers. But when they do manage the way back and have plenty to eat, they regain their beautiful silver colouring and proper shape; they may come upstream two or three times more during their life-time of about nine years.

In the meantime the eggs, which are usually laid in the autumn, spend the whole winter laying down, and if the water is very cold they do not hatch for about five months. They are called Salmon "Fry", and needn't look for food at first because there is enough yolk in the eggs to feed them. When they start to swim about the river they are called "Parr", while they are swimming in shoals they catch littler insects and other morsels of food. When they are about two years old, they are ready to leave the river and swim right out to the sea, there they grow quite fast and begin to look like their parents. But when the time comes for each new lot of Salmon to come up a river and spawn, they always find their way back to the river where they themselves started life.

Scientists say that perhaps they use the sense of smell or might use the earth magnetic. That is indeed one of the mysteries of nature beyond human understanding.