The Atlantic Salmon

By Al Lowe
Contributor

This is not about Northern Ontario at all. Most of you will never have seen an Atlantic Salmon, much less eaten one. Yet it is still about Ontario and one of its lost resources.
The Atlantic Salmon, Salmo salar, is a fish which has been honoured for many centuries. The Romans greatly admired it for its taste, and for its fighting qualities. In Scotland, ordinary folk developed poaching from the gentry into a fine are. All around the Northern Atlantic, this fish has been prized. When it comes up the river to spawn, it makes prodigious leaps over obstacles, runs through violent rapids, and even pushes itself along over the gravel in shallow water. It has been known to leap 15 foot waterfalls.
When hooked by fly fishing, it goes through a tremendous fighting performance. This has given it the name 'King of Fish.' The long rushes, the great leaps and spectacular turns give the angler everything he could want in the way of fishing excitement.
The Atlantic Salmon, like its Pacific relatives, is born in fresh water, always in the fall. The young 'parr' stay there for several years. Then they migrate to the sea and obscurity. They spend more years in the sea, and grow at a great rate. Adults may be anywhere from, 10 pounds to 50 or more. Like all salmon, they tend to return to the stream where they were hatched, starting upward in the spring. But they don't spawn until fall. If the trip is a short one, they just hang around till autumn. But if it is long, it may take all summer to get there. Again, unlike the Pacific Salmon, they don't always die after spawning, but may return to spawn several times. The female excavates a hole in the gravel with her tail. The eggs and milt are deposited, and a new generation starts on its way.
The Atlantic Salmon was originally found all around the North Atlantic - Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, eastern Canada and New England. It also came up the St. Lawrence and spawned all around Lake Ontario. At one time, salmon fishing was a big source of food.
But the salmon industry in Lake Ontario was doomed. With settlement came dams and mills run by water power. Streams were used for convenient sewage disposal, logging clogged the rivers with sawdust and bark as well as timber. The salmon simply could not survive these things. So by about 1900, all the Atlantic Salmon had disappeared from Lake Ontario. So, for almost 100 years, there have been no Altantics in the lake.
Things are starting to look up however. We have finally begun to clean up our act. The rivers are beginning to return to some resemblance of their original purity. So much so that in many of them, the salmon can again reproduce. It has been re-introduced into a lot of southern Ontario streams. So the Credit, the Ganaraska and the Trent may turn out to be fertile sources of this admired fish.
For curiosity's sake, the largest salmon ever caught was in Norway, at 79 pounds. The Canadian record is 55 pounds, taken in the Cascapedia River in Quebec.