A Temporary Refuge by Lee Spencer

Author:Lee Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Flyfishing
ISBN: 9781938340680
Publisher: Patagonia
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

On her third day in the pool, after rains had raised the creek thirteen inches, male steelhead tried to court her in the channel below the pool. They appeared to want to attend her closely and quivered their bodies next to hers while she held over her egg depression. Occasionally she went to her side and worked on the nest. She aggressively interacted with virtually all the fish, driving them off, at least fifteen times during a half-hour period. One of the interesting aspects of this courting was that the male steelhead that courted her got progressively larger, until the last one was the largest steelhead in the pool.

Two days later, a bright silver ten-inch-long, big-eyed smolt of some kind came to attend her and she did not drive it off. The large size of this smolt strongly suggests that it was a chinook. Of course, being more than forty times its mass, the female chinook may not have been particularly aware of it. Nonetheless, this smolt swam over and under her ventral region, attended her, and quivered strongly against her side. The next morning, part of the egg depression was filled in and the female’s belly was sunken for a ways, so spawning seems to have taken place. I saw the smolt in the pool at least once subsequently, but never again attending the female. I have never seen, before nor since, another Pacific salmon smolt that even vaguely resembled this big-eyed fish.

Unfortunately, I had not learned enough by that time to examine the shape of the smolt’s anal fin. That would have been a dead giveaway as to whether it was a chinook. During the seventh season, in 2005, a six- to eight-inch-long spring chinook parr, with the tips of its anal and ventral fins distinctively white, was actively consorting with and wagging its way slowly among the steelhead as it swam up and down through the pod. This minute spring chinook was not a silver fish and had subdued parr marks on its flanks. On one occasion, with its mouth open, this small actively wagging fish bumped a steelhead in the vent region.

During the fourth season, in 2002, several spring chinook males held in the pool for most of the season. On two occasions, the dominant male courted the steelhead by agitatedly quivering its body while holding in proximity to both males and females. On the first of these occasions, the male chinook’s fins reached the surface and its shuddering was so violent that the splashes it caused were both visible and audible. In early October, on the day before it disappeared from the pool, this spring chinook approached only short-jawed steelhead and displayed with his tail flexed upward in the water.

From these observations, it is clear that the two species of Pacific salmon probably have sexual selection behaviors and pheromones in common. I also wonder where the smolt had come from, presumably with mature sperm? Could this have been an immature fish that matured rapidly when

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