Prom Night In Alaska

It was like being a chaperone at the junior prom.

K.C. and Scott let us get our breath after Denali, served us some delicious chunks off her 286-pound halibut (what the hell, Alaska?), and then walked us a mile or so into the woods near their house. Where, instead of terminating at what would have been a perfectly acceptable mushroom or salamander, we stood on the banks of a wide, graveled, braided river and watched sockeye salmon churn upriver in ardent anticipation. Thousands. Thousands of cherry-colored fish on their way to a very important date.

Cherry-colored. Why? They start out blue and white like any sensible ocean-going fish, but then, as the urge strikes, they turn bright red and their heads turn green and the males get long in the nose and develop a hump; make of that what you will. Why green heads? Because nothing goes better with red. It is possible there is a more involved explanation than that but beauty has its purpose.

The involved explanations would also have you believe that redness indicates fitness and salmon choose each other on that basis, as though they're conducting a job interview, but what else is beauty? You might as well say they choose the beauty. After all, we do too. Sockeye salmon, like other salmon, get the pigments in their flesh from what they eat, primarily nice pink krill and the like. That's also why tomatoes, and your better flamingos, aren't white. Carotenoids. You spend a few years in the ocean eating what nature intended and you're going to look really appealing on the plate, not that that's much of an evolutionary driver.

So when things feel just right, and hormones start acting up, and you're a sockeye, you turn red and green and humpy. Trust me, there is nothing weird you can't blame on hormones. You turn red because those terrific pigments you hoisted from your dinner start to move toward the skin under your scales, and your scales are transparent.

I've wondered about the nature of the salmon's motivation to spawn before. Sure, we fling around phrases like "biological imperative" and we know that whatever scoots them along gets rewarded in progeny. But still. It's not like anyone sticks anything in anyone else. Or even, really, touches. It's hard to imagine the draw. Until you remember new love.

And no one has much of an explanation for that. Someone catches your notice and sparks your flesh, and there's a quake within you, and you are drawn inexorably to that person, pulled right across the room to that person, and nothing is more important than closing the physical gap between you, and who can reason that out? Is there any point in trying? You are in such thrall you will offer up the secrets of your heart. You will vibrate the silky web. You will show your reddest meat.

The biggest, reddest males have the most success at this business, and get to swim next to their beloved and shoot sperm over her dropped eggs, but sometimes the lesser males get a squirt in too, later, after everyone's gone. Just like at the prom.

We're standing by the punchbowl watching the feints and fumbles and surges and urges. Love and beauty, that's what we're watching.

I've Got Your Biological Imperative Right Here

The nicest lady

The nicest lady volunteered to take a group of us out to the Gorge to watch salmon spawning. I was all over it. I figured she'd have plenty of practice spotting salmon, and I'd have a better chance of seeing them myself. But they weren't hard to spot. There were a skillion salmon out there just having at it, and they did not care who was watching.

It's a heroic little venture those fish have going. Zip out to the ocean, spend a few years, and motor back to the home stream just in time to spawn and drop dead. Reproduction is the usual collaborative effort between males and females, but it's hard to see what's in it for anybody. There's a biological imperative operating, and whoever doesn't get with the program is a dead-end kid, in terms of personal legacy. But what a shoddy deal.

The female, at least, can look forward to dropping a lot of eggs more or less at once. That's certainly an improvement over the human model, which is one long protracted interlude of bloat and dirty laundry without a lot to show for most of it. The salmon is going to have a shot at a couple thousand kids, but she's not going to see them into kindergarten.

The way it works is the salmon make their way to the cold, fresh waters of their childhood. The females set about making a nest in the gravelly stream bottom. They do this by turning sideways and going whappity whappity whappity with their tails, cleaning the scuzz off the pebbles and sending the smaller stuff and silt downstream, until they've scooped out a  bit of a depression. The finished product is called a "redd" and can be observed as a clean patch of gravel in the stream bottom, as well as in crossword puzzles. Once she's got everything just so, she signals a male from among the group hanging out nearby, and they sidle up to each other and she drops some eggs and he shoots his wad of milt and the female makes an attempt to cover the eggs and whatever doesn't get eaten by birds or bears or other fish turns into salmon babies. Once the little guys are an inch long, we call them "fry," which is just rude. It's like calling piglets "roast."

The female might do this up to seven times, always traveling upstream, and the disturbed gravel and silt from her whappiting float down and help cover her previous efforts. That part is slick. The nature of the motivation for the males is unclear. On his way to the spawning grounds, he grows a set of canine teeth with which he can take a nip out of the butts of competing males. So some of the thrashing we witnessed was females making a nest and some of it was males duking it out for the privilege of wanking off in front of a female. Because when he finally gets the word from a ready female, there isn't anything like what we'd consider real erotic contact. They just swim side by side. The nearness of you, and all that. It's got to be done; but it seems less like passion than, say, patriotism. And then there's the whole dying part.

Mmm. Braaiiiins.

These salmon look beat to hell, and no mistake. They're patchy and weird. They quit eating when they reach freshwater, and their stomachs crumble away. The females' tails are shredded up from all the whappiting. They're a mess. And besides that, they're constantly dodging dead salmon floating downstream, which you would think would give them pause. But salmon, to their credit, do not suffer from existential dread.

Many of the salmon we saw looked, from the relatively good condition of their tails, as though they had died before spawning, which is altogether the wrong order of events. It's been a rough year for water in the Northwest. It's too shallow. It's too warm. It's too altogether missing.

But it's all the same to the bears, who'll take their fish dead, dying, or shiny. They haul them up into the woods, eat their brains, discard the rest, and poop, thus effectively redistributing nitrogen to the forest plants. You always knew what they do in the woods. Now you know why. They're always thinking of others, bears.

Here's a little video of our salmon, plus a bonus video of an American Dipper who thinks there might just be salmon eggs around (and he's right):