"The herring is beyond question the most important of food fishes in the Atlantic, if not in the world," declared the late G. Brown Goode, formerly Assistant U. S. Fish Commissioner. It affords occupation for immense fleets of boats, and thousands of men, nowhere more numerously than in the North Sea and along the Norwegian coasts. Professor Huxley once gave 3,000,000,000 as the number of herring taken annually from the North Atlantic; but Dr. Goode showed that this was far too low an estimate, and added that it probably was "no greater than the number contained in a single shoal if it covers half a dozen square miles, and shoals of much greater size are on record. And ... at one and the same time scores of shoals must be scattered through the North Sea and the North Atlantic, any one of which would go a long way toward supplying the whole of man's consumption of herring." Herrings are surface swimmers, and their food consists of the small organisms, chiefly crustaceous, which have been described as "plankton" in the early pages of this book. They themselves afford food to every predatory fish, squid, whale, and bird that frequents their region (mainly north of the fortieth parallel of latitude), and which has the wit and ability to seize them. They move here and there in shoals for food, and in spring migrate to the shallows and rivers of the northern coasts to spawn. Besides the Atlantic herring, a very similar species throngs in the North Pacific, and several others live in the Great Lakes and other waters of this country.
No fishes are better known in America than the salmon, trout, and whitefish, which are near relatives. Of the salmon there are many kinds in all the northern parts of the world and in the open ocean. Some ascend rivers to spawn, and some do not. Our Atlantic salmon, once so abundant in every river from Connecticut northward, is the same as the salmon of Europe, and the king of game fish. Now it is at all numerous only in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, climbing the waterfalls of those mountain streams to their very springs to deposit its eggs, whence few individuals survive to return to the ocean. The heaviest salmon on record is one of eighty-three pounds captured in England in 1821; an American example of forty pounds is considered very large.
The salmon of the North Pacific are of a different genus (Onchorhynchus) and consist of several species, some Asiatic. On the American side we have five species, and most of them have been seen in all the rivers from central California to Alaska, Siberia and Japan; but the blueback predominates in Fraser River and in the Yukon; the silver salmon in Puget Sound; the quinnat or Chinook salmon in the Columbia and Sacramento; while the comparatively worthless dog salmon is seen everywhere. The quinnat and blueback enter and "run" the rivers in the spring, and are caught when in prime condition, whereas the other three run in the fall, and are more usually caught after deterioration; hence "spring" salmon are best in fact and in trade.
The habits of the salmon in the ocean are not easily studied, but Jordan, Evermann, and other diligent students have come to certain conclusions from a great number of facts. They believe that the king and the silver salmon probably remain not far from the rivers where they were born. The blueback and dog salmon probably seek deeper water. It is the prevailing impression that the salmons have some special instinct which leads them to return to spawn on the same grounds where they were hatched, but Dr. Jordan says:
"We fail to find any evidence of this. It seems more probable that the young salmon hatched in any river mostly remain in the ocean within a radius of twenty, thirty or forty miles of its mouth. These, in their movements about in the ocean, may come into contact with the cold waters of their parent river, or perhaps of any other river, at a considerable distance from shore. In the case of the quinnat and the blueback, their 'instinct' seems to lead them to ascend these fresh waters, and in a majority of cases these waters will be those in which the fishes in question were originally spawned."
As to the fate of the spawning fish, after the eggs and milt have been voided, and their duty is done, the salmon begin to float downstream tail foremost. The great majority of them die—certainly all at the headwaters of the big streams; and it is the opinion of the best judges that none ever get back from anywhere alive into the ocean after spawning, but that the race is sustained wholly by the escape of the young each year. It is supposed that non return from the sea, or attempt to ascend the rivers until at least three years old.
Trout are in most cases simply small species of salmon, and a great number of kinds inhabit the ocean, lakes, and rivers of all northern countries, for none of this great family occur in the tropics or in the southern hemisphere. Our western trout—the widely distributed and variable cutthroat, the steel-head of the northwestern coast, the beautiful rainbow trout of the Coast Ranges, and others are examples. The common brown "brook" trout of Great Britain belongs here; but our brook trout, the "speckled beauty" of anglers and poets, is of a slightly different kind (genus Salvelinus), for it is classed with the European charrs. The Dolly Varden trout of the Rocky Mountains and the Sunapee trout are also charrs. The graylings, namaycushes, and smelts are members of this family, whose final representative among us is the numerous and very valuable section of whitefish and lake herrings of the Great Lakes and Canada generally.
No family of fish is of more importance as food for man, not to speak of the sport many of its members afford, than this; yet, doubtless, it would have been nearly destroyed by this time had it not been for the intelligent and patient work of fish culturists and the farsightedness of governments, both Federal and State, and Canadian, in supporting and extending economic replenishing of depleted waters. The organization and breeding habits of the salmon tribe lend themselves to this work.
Passing by some families of deep-sea fishes, of small size and most bizarre outlines, we come to the suborder that contains the carps, catfishes and "minnows" of our lakes and streams. Here, the first to present itself, in the large family Characinidæ, is that fierce little brute of South American rivers, the "piranha" or "caribe," of which Col. Theodore Roosevelt had so much to say in describing his explorations in Brazil in 1913 and 1914. One of his companions was Leo E. Miller, who has since published another account and increases the bad reputation of the caribe by what he has to tell of its ferocity: