Atlantic Salmon
Salmo salar
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Leaves the Nith as a fish the length of your hand and comes back years later from Greenland.
A powerful, streamlined, silver fish with a small pointed head and a slightly forked tail. Adults returning from the sea are bright chrome-silver, darkening to bronze and red as spawning nears, when males develop a hooked lower jaw called a kype. The Nith is one of Scotland's notable salmon rivers, and fish run it from spring through to late autumn before spawning in the clean gravel of the headwaters.
Behaviour
Salmon spawn in winter, the female cutting a depression in gravel — a redd — with her tail. Young fish spend one to three years in the river before smolting to silver and heading to sea. Adults returning to spawn navigate back to the very burn they hatched in, apparently by a combination of magnetic sense and smell. Most do not eat at all once they enter fresh water, living on reserves built up at sea.
Migration
Nith salmon feed in the North Atlantic, off the Faroes and West Greenland, before returning to their natal river. Numbers have fallen sharply across their range, and every stage of that journey — river, estuary and ocean — matters to whether the run holds up.
When to see it
Quick facts
- Family
- Salmon and trout (Salmonidae)
- Size
- Typically 50–100 cm on return · can exceed 10 kg
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