Salmon stories

By V. Paul Reynolds

Many years ago, while ice fishing alone at Seboeis Lake, I caught a mystery fish through the ice. It was a salmon, sort of. But it looked nothing like the fat, sassy landlocked salmon that I had come to know from my winters at the lake. It was a big, kype-jawed male, but a malnourished fish with more head than body.

Hmmm, I wondered to myself. “Could this be an old broodstock fish that the state put in the lake just to get rid of, which had been done before in some other bodies of water?” According to state fisheries biologist Greg Burr, “In the 1990s the Atlantic Salmon Commission gave IFW some captive brood stock that they were not going to use any more for egg production. We then stocked a number of waters with these retired brood Atlantic salmon in late fall. Waters like Branch, Eagle, Mopang, and a few others received them. They did not do very well in the lakes and quickly got very skinny and most died within a few months. A few lasted into the spring and anglers caught some but they had the shape of a smelt.”

I never did solve the Seboeis Lake riddle, nor did I ever catch another one like it there. Looking back, in context of what we now know, my mystery fish may well have been an Atlantic salmon that had somehow migrated its way up the various waterways into the lake. A few years later, an ice fisherman on West Pond of Ebeemee caught a fish that was confirmed by a fisheries biologist to have been a bona fide Atlantic salmon.

Then, just this winter, a woman fishing at Schoodic Lake caught a large salmon through the ice. That fish was also later confirmed to be an Atlantic salmon by the Enfield fisheries biologist.  And interestingly, Jason Smith, an underwater drone hobbyist from Milo, has some fascinating sub-surface video of Atlantic salmon vying for spawning rights with some smaller landlocked salmon at the lake outlet in November. (Check out his Youtube footage at Maine Freshwater Exploration).

If you are a curious sort like me, all of this begets the question: How many of these Atlantics are actually getting up the Penobscot River tributaries and into Maine lakes? Historically regarded as an anomaly or a fluke, is this fisheries event more commonplace than we once thought? So far this year, a little over 200 Atlantic salmon have been counted at the fish passage counting station on the Penobscot River. When you think about it, isn’t it a wonder of Nature that these spectacular fish can make it so far from the sea and bridge so many barriers, natural and man-made, and wind up in one of our northern inland lakes?

Another question that came to my mind was: “Will Atlantic salmon breed with landlocked salmon?” Why not? DNA wise, they are identical fish. Greg Burr again. “Landlocked salmon and Atlantic salmon can spawn with each other, but usually Atlantic salmon spawn earlier than landlocks. Usually Atlantics spawn around mid September and landlocks spawn at the end of September and into November. This is why Atlantic salmon biologists always worry about landlocked salmon superimposing their redds over the top of the Atlantic’s redds.”

We know that the ancestors of Maine’s landlocked Sebago salmon once lived at sea. If you watch Jason Smith’s video footage of the Schoodic Lake spawning ballet, the largest of the male leapers is a fin-punched Atlantic who is competing with male landlockeds for the spawning rights. This means that possibly in a few years, the salmon you catch at Schoodic Lake, could be the mixed progeny of a landlocked fish and a sea-run Atlantic.

Who would a thunk it?

The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network. He has authored three books. Online purchase information is available at www.sportingjournal.com, Outdoor Books.