At the arboretum, we are participating in the Fish Eggs to Fry education program through Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) with spring chinook salmon. I wanted to show you these beautiful fry with this short video and introduce you to the beginning of the salmon’s life.
We got the equipment and set up the tank on Friday Oct. 9 to make sure that everything was up and running properly for when we received the eggs. The tank comes with a filter, a water chiller, a diffuser to return the chilled water back to the tank, and small rocks for the bottom of the tank.
The eggs arrived on Oct. 14 and started hatching out about a week later. At this stage the salmon are called alevin. As you can see in the video, they have a nutrient-rich egg yolk attached to their bodies. This bright orange sack provides all of their needs to continue to develop and they do not feed on anything from their surrounding environment. It takes two to three weeks for the alevins to develop into their next stage called fry. At this stage we will release them into the coast fork of the Willamette here at the arboretum. As the salmon develop in this stage, they will record the chemical and mineral makeup of their natal stream through a process called olfactory imprinting. Miraculously, this memory will guide them back here years from now as they return from the ocean to spawn. The spring chinook will spend about one year in freshwater before entering the salty environment of the ocean. There are numerous resources out there detailing the life cycle of salmon and I recommend that you check them out. It is an incredible story!
As always, I hope to inspire you to learn more about nature. I hope to see you out there.
