A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
salmon
Salmon are fish that hatch in fresh water, migrate to the sea to grow, and return to the river of their birth to spawn. They find the coast by a mechanism that appears to involve the earth’s magnetic field, and they find the specific stream by smell, having imprinted on its chemistry as young fish. Pacific species spawn once and die; Atlantic salmon can survive to return again.
Etymology
The word came into English from Old French and Latin, and it displaced the Old English word for the fish, which was lax. That older word survives in gravlax and in the Scandinavian and German names.
Notes
The carcasses are the point ecologically. A salmon run carries ocean nitrogen and phosphorus far inland and leaves it in the forest, and isotope work has traced marine-derived nutrients into the wood of streamside trees, into bears, and into the soil. A river with salmon in it grows different trees from one without.