Salmon Disprove One Theory: They Can Go Home Again, and Do

The birth of a salmon is a triumph of spirit, a celebration of life. For fishermen working a salmon run, there is a sense of participation in one of nature’s timeless dramas.

Hatching out of tiny eggs in shallow-water gravels of tributaries to a river, little salmon survive at first by absorbing energy from their attached yolk sacs, then by eating plankton and other tiny foods. After about a year, they move downstream. When only four to six inches long, they swim into the open ocean.

Salmon range up to thousands of miles at sea. After three to five years, salmon, fat and ripe, are mysteriously summoned, as if magnetized, to the streams of their birth. In some cases, such as in the gigantic Yukon River system, salmon travel as far as 2,000 miles, surviving predators such as grizzly bears, and try again and again to leap over waterfalls as high as 12 feet.

They can pass hundreds of tributaries before turning into the stream of their birth.

Female salmon, worn, ragged, thin and scarred from their arduous journey, thrash out a depression in the gravel and lay their eggs. The eggs are fertilized by a male, then covered with gravel again. Shortly afterward, the fish drift downstream, dead.

The following spring, the hundreds of little eggs begin to hatch beneath the gravel. The cycle begins anew.

It’s been said before: Only death prevents a salmon from reaching its goal, and death is its only reward.