Living in Boston, it was all about lobster. Here in Seattle, it's all about the salmon. A while back, I posted a picture of the fish ladder found at lock at Salmon Bay. This was just the beginning of my education on salmon. The locks/dam/fish ladder represent the barrier between the freshwater inland and the seawater in Puget Sound.
While at the locks, I learned that every year, salmon ready to spawn smell the freshwater pouring down the fish ladder and are attracted to it. They then jump up the ladder and head to the water they were born (they somehow remember the smell) and find a mate to spawn. After spawning the salmon guard the eggs. They end up guarding the eggs until they die (once they get to freshwater they stop eating). The dead fish then feed an entire ecosystem. If salmon were to die off, many other species of wildlife would be greatly affected.
Until a few weeks ago, I had only seen the fish jumping up the ladder. Then, I was walking toward a plane on the flight line at Boeing the other day and stopped on the bridge that separates the storage area from the airport. I smelled something terrible and looked down into the water only to see a bunch of dead fish! I was at first very alarmed to see so many dead fish, assuming something disastrous had happened.
I then remembered what I had learned at the fish locks. This was the natural cycle of salmon. I then looked more closely and saw several live salmon spawning (look for the red fish in the lower right corner).
For someone who has never seen salmon in the wild prior to August, this was a very interesting experience. I feel as though I have now seen the entire salmon life cycle... except for all of the fun they get to have swimming around the ocean.
