Salmon Facts

Teflonfish catches only King Salmon, the best-tasting salmon and the largest of the five species found in the Pacific Ocean. King salmon (oncorhynchus tshawytscha) are also known as Chinook, spring, quinnat, tyee, tule, and blackmouth.

The largest king salmon was 126 pounds, caught in a fish trap near Petersburg, Alaska in 1949. The largest king salmon caught for sport was 96 pounds, caught in the Kenai River in 1986.

In North America, king salmon range from south of Monterey Bay, California to the Chukchi Sea area of Alaska. On the Asian coast, chinook salmon occur from the Anadyr River area of Siberia southward to Hokkaido, Japan.

In the ocean the king salmon has a bluish-green coloration on the back which fades to a silvery color on the sides and white on the belly. Colors of spawning king salmon in fresh water range from red to copper to almost black, depending on location and degree of maturation. The males tend to be more colorful than the females.

Like all salmon, the king is anadromous, meaning it lives in both fresh and saltwater during its lifetime. Hatching in rivers, or introduced to rivers as fry, the salmon migrate to the ocean where they spend most of their life before returning to the freshwater source they started in to spawn and die. All king salmon die after spawning. Bummer. Salmon may return to spawn (once) from their second to seventh year. King salmon do not eat during their freshwater spawning migration, which can last 60 days or up to 2000 miles, so their condition gradually degrades as they make their way upstream.

A female deposits from 3,000 to 14,000 eggs in gravel in clear, moving water. Since there's much less good spawning grounds than there used to be due to humans, humans now take a very active hand in helping out the salmon population with hatcheries. Hatched eggs are called alevin, and live in the gravel or are raised by humans until they absorb the food in their attached yolk sac. Frys are the next stage of delopement, when the salmon lives on plankton and insects in fresh water. By their second year the frys are ready to head to the open ocean and are called smolts.

Once a king salmon reaches the ocean it can double in weight during one season, eating herring, pilchard, sandlance, squid, crustaceans, and other tasty things. The distinctive bright red color of the salmon's meat is caused by their diet. Farm-raised salmon are fed natural and synthetic dyes to keep the meat from being an unappetizing gray. Farm-raised salmon also don't get the exercise a Pacific Ocean salmon gets, resulting in a different fat content and a less marbled meat.

The king salmon is often the most prized catch for sport fisherman on the pacific coast from Alaska to California. Not only is it good eating, it's also fun to catch. Sport fishermen use bait (usually herring) or lures, same as we do on the Teflonfish. We however, never use snelled (barbed) hooks.

King salmon of the pacific coast are closely monitored and regulated to help ensure the proliferation and sustainable harvest of the species. There is a minimum size limit for both sport and commercial fishing, and dynamically allocated seasons in which it is legal to catch the fish.

Other types of salmon include:
Chum, or "dog", salmon (oncorhynchus keta) earned its name because it doesn't taste very good and has been historically used as dog food by native Alaskans. They can be up to 30 pounds, but usually are 7 to 18 pounds.

Coho, or "silver", salmon (oncorhynchus kisutch) can look very similar to king salmon and are good eatin' and fun to fish. They can be up to 31 pounds, but are usually 8 to 12 pounds.

Pink, or "humpback", salmon (oncorhynchus gorbuscha) has a very obvious hump on the back of spawning males which stores fat on which they survive during spawning. Humpbacks average about 4 pounds. The ones that have started building up a hump taste terrible, as this author has learned firsthand while fishing in Alaska. They are fished commercially most often with purse seines or gillnets, and are usually canned.

Sockeye, "red" or "blueback", salmon (oncorhynchus nerka) are usually about 8 pounds and are edible enough to be commercially fished. Historically they were preferred for canning because their red color survived the canning process. Today almost half the sockeye catch is frozen, rather than canned. The biggest harvest of sockeye salmon worldwide occurs in the Bristol Bay area of southwestern Alaska where more than 30 million sockeye salmon may be caught with gillnets during an open season lasting only a few weeks annually.

Atlantic salmon, sometimes sold as "farm-raised", salmon (salmo salar) is different from Pacific salmon in that it can return to spawn more than once. They are a popular sportfish when they can be found in the wild, as they grow up to 70 pounds and are very aggressive. They are now extinct in southern Europe and are greatly diminished in number throughout atlantic fishing grounds where they used to be commercially viable. The only self-supporting Atlantic salmon runs in the USA are found in eastern Maine. Thus, most atlantic salmon is "farm-raised".

About farm-raised salmon
Salmon farms raise fish to saleable size in floating pens. Most common is the Atlantic Salmon, which is raised in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from Canada to Chile. Farm-raised salmon are fed scientifically designed and controlled diets, which contain antibiotics and coloring. The antibiotics are necessary because the farms produce a very limited genetic line which can be decimated by a single event. The coloring is needed because the diet of the fish causes the fish to have a gray flesh which most consumers don't associate with salmon. Farm-raised salmon tastes pretty good and can be available year round, though.

Many people are very against farm-raised salmon for environmental and health reasons. Here are some of the better online links: The Alaskan Department of Fish and Game has a white paper on Atlantic salmon as well as a page of links.

Salmon color is explained in photos and unintentionally funny text by the manufacturer of Carophyll® Pink (astaxanthin; F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.). "To the consumer, color can indicate the age of fish at harvest, flavor, texture, origin and species." ...But not after you feed them full of Carophyll® Pink.

Choosing the Right Fish

Examine the whole fish. If it's still swimming, it's fresh. This is the best test for a fresh fish. If it's not swimming, someone caught it already, and hopefully bled, gutted, and iced it for you. That's what we do.

The fish should be gutted. Fish that aren't gutted get smelly, gross, and inedible faster than they need to. Also, you don't need to pay for the weight of the guts, since you're probably not going to be eating them.

The fish should be bled and the gill plate removed.

The fish should have all its scales. Though it is not a bad sign if a few scales are missing, if whole areas have missing scales the fish may have been unhealthy or mishandled after catching. There should be no gashes or holes in the body from gaffing or other mistakes by the fisherman. Yucky things can happen once the fish is damaged this way.

The eyes should be clear and glassy. The longer a fish spends out of the water or at improper temperature, the more glazed and flaccid its eyes.

But you won't always be buying a whole fish. Often you won't get much of a chance to examine the scales or eyes. Here's what to notice in the meat.

Does it smell like fish? The odor most people think of as "fish" is not what they smell like when we catch them. A fresh-caught fish and its meat smells much different than what you'll often smell in the store. Smell some sushi: good sushi has *at most* a slight scent. Good fresh fish should have nearly no odor. Nasty smells are nature's way of saying, "Don't eat it!" Explaining Limburger cheese is difficult.

The meat should be redder than you might guess for king salmon. Store-bought salmon doesn't look terribly similar to what we see in our fish off the boat. Our fish have meat that is not orange, but red. The well-oxygenated fresh meat of a live fish is almost translucent and stained-glass-like. This changes to the more solid-feeling and -looking reddish orange we usually see in the stores after some hours. King salmon shouldn't be orange until after you cook it.

Other Species of Fish

Most of the above is also true for purchasing fresh fish of other species. Don't look for red meat on Dover Sole, though. The savvy 21st century will want to make decisions based on health, politics, and ecology.

Health

Fish are good for you. They're lower in fat than most any other meat. Fish generally have less cholesterol than other types of meat, although some shellfish is high in cholesterol content.

Farmed fish may not be the correct choice if health is an issue.

Politics

Fish are often caught in places you don't like. Gillnetting, bad. Sustainable fishing, good. Chilean sea bass is Patagonian toothfish.

Ecology

Encourage only the harvesting of a product that is sustainable. Many species of fish are taken in gillnets without regard to being able to continue the same harvest next year. Many types of fish are caught in huge purse seines that discard a large percentage of the nontargetted catch. Many types of fish previously caught in what seemed to be unlimited supply are no longer found in commercially viable numbers.

Farmed fish are often accidentally or purposely released into the wild, where they interfere with existing species. "Atlantic salmon" rarely means what it sounds like. "Atlantic salmon" is the species of salmon most commonly farmed. Beyond the health issues, a farmed fish adds no useful biomass to the surrounding environment and isn't genetically diverse enough to a useful addition to the environment anyhow. Which is not to say that farm fish introduced to a new environment can't thrive. In fact, Atlantic salmon that have escaped their pens in Canada are a serious problem to the Alaska Dpeartment of Fish and Game, who call it "...an invasive threat."

Here's a list of what's good and what's bad and why.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium works hard to maintain an updated "Seafood Watch Program". The salmon we get are at the top of their list of what's good to buy. "We believe wild salmon from a well-regulated fishery is the most environmentally-sound choice."

On their list of fish to avoid is farmed salmon: "Raising salmon in ocean pens pollutes the water with feces and can spread disease to wild salmon. Farmed salmon eat fishmeal made from ocean fish, so salmon farming may contribute to the depletion of ocean food chains. Also, it's usually Atlantic salmon that are farmed—even in the Pacific. Salmon that escape from farms can cause problems for native wild salmon."