WILY THE SALMON IS PINK

Cromwell Argus, Volume LIII, Issue 2793, 6 November 1922, Page 6

WILY THE SALMON IS PINK

Men of science weie long puzzled to know why the various salmon and trout have red or pink flesh. Now they believe that the color comes from the food they eat (observes the 'Youth's Companion'). All of the salmon family are particularly fond of shellfish; and trout eagerly feed on fresh-water shrimp. It is well known that when lobsters, prawns, and shrimp are cooked the flesh turns pink; similarly the process of digestion turns shellfish pink. When a shrimp is found in the stomach of a salmon or a trout the gastric juices of the fish have turned it almost as red jor pink an if it had been boiled. Therefore, even if we had no definite proof, wo might believe that the color of the flesh of salmon and trout results from the considerable quantities of various small shellfish that the fishes eat. But there is definite proof. Several years ago Professor Leger, of the Piscicultural Laboratory at Grenoble, France, mode experiments with trout to determine what gave their flesh its color. He separated the eggs from one trout into two lots and hatched them in different troughs. He fed one lot of young fish exclusively on freshwater shrimps: to the other lot he gave no shrimps whatever. At the end of the second year tho trout that had fed on shrimps had salmon-colored' flesh, but the flesh of the other trout was perfectly white. '"But someone may ask. Why is the flesh of shellfish red or pink? That is a hard question to answer. Perhaps the color comes from the food the shellfish eat. Not long a<?o chemists of the Department ui Agriculture at Washington examined sumo pink oysters that had been found in Long Island. Sound, and declared that they were delicious. The chemists suggested that possibly the bright hue of the flesh was caused by food that contained wild yeast bacilli and other similar microorganisms.