Sockeye Salmon Breeding Description

Time Frame

• The sockeye salmon after it is born usually spends between one and three years in its freshwater environment, which can include lakes, streams, rivers and estuaries. It then moves into the ocean, where it stays for as long as five years, but usually for a shorter period, before returning to the freshwater habitat where it was born to breed. Only those sockeye salmon that occur in landlocked lakes, called kokanee salmon, do not make the trip to the ocean.

Color Change

• Before entering the ocean and while in a marine environment, sockeye salmon are a metallic shade of bluish-green on the head and back. The sides are silvery and the fish's belly region is a combination of white and silver. After entering freshwater for breeding purposes, the colors convert to shades of dark or bright red on the sides and the back. The head becomes hues of olive green and the lower jaw is white. Males develop an obviously humped back, while their jaws take on a hooked appearance.

Danger and Competition

• Predators such as bald eagles, wolves and different types of bears are potentially fatal threats to the sockeye salmon as it makes it ways inland to its breeding grounds during the summer months. Once they finally arrive, the females compete with each other for the optimum nesting spots in a gravelly section of the river or lake. The males also stage competitions with one another for the right to breed with the females. After spawning, the adult sockeye salmon dies.

Breeding

• Once a female selects a spot to deposit her eggs, she creates a shallow nest known as a redd by fanning the gravel with her tail until a depression forms. The female gets upstream from the redd and deposits her eggs, with at least one male present to fertilize them as she does so. Females can deposit as many as 4,500 eggs in about five separate batches, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After depositing her eggs, the female covers them with gravel she loosens with her tail. Sockeye salmon eggs hatch during the winter months, with the young remaining in the gravel, consuming the yolk sac of the egg for nourishment until old enough to capture their own food.