Large salmon a thing of the past

Where have all these bad girls gone?

-Allen

Holy Cow Batman  

Where have all these bad girls gone?

-Allen

My guess is that they were all salted down in 100lb barrels and sent to Europe on sailing ships.  

kings seem to get bigger farther north, and probably attain different sizes depending on the food available.  Perhaps sardines being bigger than anchovies the salmon are also larger when sardines outnumber anchovies.  

CA state record is 88lbs in 1979
Alaska record is 97lbs in 1985 - but alaskan hatchery folk regularly see 120lb fish come in to spawn.

WA state record is only something like 70#.  The 100# fish are a true rarity in the NW.  The fact that they hung 2 in the same day leads me to believe they were more common 100 years ago.

-Allen

I'm not sure if 100 pounders have been netted, but I have heard of game and fish in Alaska, Washington and Oregon netting fish bigger than the current records. They would do it to tag fish and make counts.

You realize that Lewis and Clarke wrote about the stench on the Columbia River from all the spawned out rotting fish carcuses, all the way up the Columbia. What's left is a token of the original runs. You could have fished till your arms got tired from pulling them in!

Take back the rivers!!!

The Elwha river on the Olympic Peninsula had a legenedary run of 100 pound salmon.  Those fish are all gone as the river was dammed in the early 1900's.  The dams are now scheduled to be removed.

Here's an interesting story and discussion on the effects the dam ... http://www.nps.gov/olym/issues/isselwha2.htm

-Allen

It would be tought to get one of those into your yak...

Those fish have hooked snouts, which mean they were spawners - that's the biggest they get.  Probably these guys had a gill-net in the river and picked out the two largest for that photo.

I read a while back that in the great lakes they were stocking salmon that'd been 'neutered' chemically as fry.  Those fish never get the urge to spawn, so just stay in the open water and grow indefinitely.  Great lakes salmon are still generally small though, out here if we did the same thing we may get some bonkers big salmon.

I read a while back that in the great lakes they were stocking salmon that'd been 'neutered' chemically as fry.  Those fish never get the urge to spawn, so just stay in the open water and grow indefinitely.  Great lakes salmon are still generally small though, out here if we did the same thing we may get some bonkers big salmon.

Aren't Triploid Rainbows essentially the same thing?  No urge to spawn.  No energy spent on creating reproductive organs.  Eat, eat, eat and grow big!!!

-Allen

The Columbia used to get a run called the June Hogs that would run up the farthest reaches of the river (in B.C.) with the spring runoff.  (The early returning, longest, steepest  runs selected the largest fish with the greatest reserves. The later runs tend to spawn lower in the river system.) Check out the Maritime Museum in Astoria OR, if you ever get the chance, for many more pictures.  The June Hogs were exterminated by the construction of Grand Coulee Dam. I've read estimates of Columbia returns, before commercial fishing began, in the order of 16-20 million salmon annually. Current runs are averaging ~1 million, with 90% of those being hatchery fish. This means that current wild returns are .5-.625 % of the original runs. I've had a state biologist tell me straight up that wild runs here on the upper Columbia will not survive without hatchery suplementation. The longterm smolt return rate is avg. at ~.5% (West side undammed rivers and lower river have a return rate 1-5%, which varys wildly, year to year.) Comparing rates, the returns to the Upper Columbia are ~80-85% smaller than the Westside and Lower runs. Is it coincidence that there is also a dam(n) mortality rate of 80-85% for the smolts from the Upper Columbia? (The rates come from a NMFS white paper I read in 1999-2000.)

I just read in the Wenatchee World newspaper this week that salmon returning to the Wenatchee area have swam upstream 465 miles. For my neighborhood, you can add at least another 100 miles. The June Hogs might have swam 700+ miles and numerous falls.

BTW- Did Polepole mention the picture of the 11'+, 1216# Alaskan halibut we saw in the store at Neah Bay?