At the last tracking club the flood waters had recently receded. The substrate along the paths was a lovely silt and we saw a number of tracks we don't usually see out there. We also found some things left over from the waters going back down including this little fish.
I'm hoping that one of my fish-knowledgeable friends will be able to identify it. We think it is a salmonid. The only salmon I see in the river in large numbers are chum salmon so that would be my first guess, but I think there are others that it could be.
--New Pic--
I guess the picture above wasn't good enough to use for identification very easily. Maybe the picture below will add some helpful details although it is unfortunately quite washed out.
3 comments:
I'm not exactly a fishy person, but I'll comment anyway. It looks salmonid to me, but I'm having a hard time seeing the features needed to differentiate between trout and salmon. "Field Identification of Coastal Juvenile Salmonids" is kind of a handy booklet to use to identify these creatures in hand. The book uses the shape of the anal fin to distinguish trout from salmon (I can't see it), then the Parr marks and adipose fin to distinguish between types of salmon. Chums have parr marks that are oval, each parr mark is shorter than the vertical diameter of the eye. Hope that all of this was vaguely helpful.
Hi Kitty, thanks for the info.
I added a new picture which may be of help for identification purposes. It looks to me like the Parr marks are longer then the vertical diameter of the eye.
My dad mentioned that he thinks chum salmon go out to the ocean when they are a lot smaller than this. He thought perhaps it was a silver.
Your Dad has a very good point. Chums and Pinks don't have a period of freshwater residency. The book that I quoted from before has this to say about coho vs. king; "coho dorsal and anal fin margins are sickle-shaped and have white and black stripes. Fins are red or orange." King fry; dorsal has a white tip and the fins lack the red or orange pigment. I'll wimp out and let you decide.
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