SALMON INDUSTRY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 13, 15 July 1937, Page 26

SALMON INDUSTRY

LIFE CYCLE OF SOCKEYE

WORK AT THE CANNERIES

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER.. June 22.

Mature salmon, returning from their three, four, or five years' sojourn in the Pacific, are caught and taken to the salmon canneries at the mouths of the Skeena, the Fraser. the JTaas. and other streams, in whose headwaters they were spawned. At the Fish House, the salmon pass through a machine called the iron chink, the brushes, scrapers, and splitting saws of which adjust themselves to the size of the fish, plitting it open, removing fin, tail, and viscera, and taking • off the head, all at the rate of a fish a minute.

The whole fish is cut up into salmon steaks. Women fill the half-pound cans, but most of the one-pound cans are filled mechanically. The machines operate to a speed of 70 cans per minute, but, in the most modern plants machines "feed salmon into cans at the rate of 130 cans a minute. Instead of the old pre-heating system, to create a vacuum in the can, the new process achieves this when the cans, already filled with salmon, are passed through a vacuum chamber while they are being seamed and sealed. The cans are then placed in trays and run into boilerlike retorts, in which they are cooked for an hour and a half, under a temperature of 240 degrees. Th<? cans are then labelled and packed in cases, prior .to being shipped to the world's markets.

From the time they commence their journey homewards to their native streams, the salmon cease to feed, subsisting on body fat. On arriving at their destination, each female deposits her eggs to the number of several thousands in a little basin which she hollows out in the river bed with snout and fin. When the eggs have been fertilised by the male,'both join in covering them with gravel, to prevent them being washed .down to tidewater by the current. The life cycle of the parent salmon thus ends. Unlike Atlantic salmon, the Pacific salmon spawn but once.

One generation of salmon is dead before the other matures, and for a time that particular "run" or family is represented, only by countless millions of eggs lying in the gravel of mountain streams. There they lie for some time, depending on the temperature of the water. A^ tiny fish begins to form in the egg, then an egg-sac, on which the fish feeds for weeks. When they emerge, to seek other food, they are victims of their natural enemiesbirds, bears, and other fish, such as trout.

The sockeye, which constitute the valuable canned salmon harvest, spend up to three years in fresh water before proceeding to the ocean, and mature in six, seven, and eight years. Their weight, at maturity, is five to seven pounds, unlike spring salmon, which are known to reach a weight of 1001b.