To Larger Lifecycle Diagram of Wild Atlantic Salmon
To Notes on Lifecycle Stages

In the fall, when stream waters cool, mature female salmon look for areas of coarse gravel to lay their eggs, (or 'spawn'). The eggs are big - about the size of a pea - and each female lays about two thousand of them. Male salmon release sperm (or 'milt') over the eggs and then they are covered with loose gravel.

In the spring, semi-transparent 'alevin' hatch and remain hidden in the gravel, feeding from a bulging yolk sac attached to their bellies. Once this sac is absorbed, the fish (now called 'fry') wriggle out of the gravel and hunt for tiny insects and animals living in the stream.

Black vertical 'parr marks' appear when they are 5 to 8 cm long, and the young salmon remain in the river as 'parr' for another two to six years, feeding on aquatic insects and larvae. One spring, when they are between 12 and 24 cm long, the little fish will feel the call of the sea. Their 'parr marks' will fade, replaced by shiny silver, and their tails will grow longer and more forked.

Traveling slowly downstream, they undergo a miraculous internal transformation to enable them to survive a life in saltwater. At the same time, the smells and tastes of their native river are imprinted on the young fish, to be recalled when it is time to spawn. After spending time in the brackish estuary at the river mouth, these 'smolts' are off to sea.

Most North American Atlantic salmon head off on long migrations to waters off Labrador and Greenland, where they eat a steady diet of crustaceans and small fish. Inner Bay of Fundy smolts, however, stay close to home, spending the winter in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine, before smelling and tasting their way back to their home rivers to lay their own eggs. They are 'repeat spawners' - returning to sea to feast and grow after laying their eggs each year.

The odds for a salmon egg aren't great. Of the couple thousand eggs laid by a female in the fall, only about 20 make it to smolt stage. The rest are snapped up in the stream as food for other animals. Back in the 1960s, 5% of the smolt leaving the inner Bay of Fundy returned to spawn. Today, fewer than 1% make it back. In real numbers, that means that if 20 female salmon laid eggs in a river one fall, only 2 or 3 would make it back to the river to spawn.

At that rate, it won't be long before these children of the wild are gone.

GRAPHIC COPYRIGHT ATLANTIC SALMON FEDERATION