This season on the Stave I have see silver chums and they are all female. All the bucks are either green or blackish. Is this normal? Do the bucks turn green as soon as they enter the Fraser?
It is normal. Male salmons arrive first to claim territory and females arrive later. So chances are if you catch a male, it would have been there for a while longer than a female on average. Larger salmon also arrive before smaller ones. What I've experienced has been consistent with this. Early on, I caught bigger fish, later on, I caught smaller fish.
http://www.marinebio.net/marinescience/05nekton/sarepro.htmhttp://salmon.southernfriedscience.com/?p=29"Older salmon tend to arrive before younger ones. Larger salmon (of a given age) tend to arrive before smaller ones. And male salmon tend to arrive before female salmon.
Migratory performance may play a part: bigger fish swim faster and arrive sooner even though they leave at the same time (larger fish have more energy to use on migration).
Feeding ecology may play a part: the optimal duration of time at sea depends on how big the fish is…if the time to migrate home comes around and you are a small fish, you might postpone your migration for a little while in order to eat more. There’s a balance between growth time and spawning time—if you stay at sea a bit longer you can grow more, but if you push migration off for too long, you’ll miss your chance to spawn.
Spawning ground dynamics may play a part: smaller fish are not as competitive and so their best strategy may be to arrive after bigger fish. Breeding dynamics favor male early arrivals too; it’s more of an energetic waste if a female arrives too early and her eggs are wasted than if a male arrives early and his sperm is wasted. Eggs are typically much more energetically expensive than sperm in the animal kingdom."
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Topic: Keeping spawned out fish??? (Read 5706 times)