Salmon: For This Big Fish, There's No Place Like Home

Google “Salmon crossing the road” and you’ll find dozens of videos of me and my pals skittering across wet streets and highways like windup toys on a mission.

- Kate Lowenstein and Daniel Gritzer

Cars slow and stop to let us cross, water spraying from our flicking tails as we navigate this unnatural landscape and flop back into the river on the other side.

The videos capture me after I’ve been away at sea for up to five years, traversing thousands of miles while eating the pink-orange krill that give my flesh its trademark rosy color. To guide me on this trek, I use my uniquely astute inner GPS (which taps into the earth’s magnetic fields) to get me closer to my birthplace. Then I begin to sniff out the specific river where I was hatched. I head home to reproduce and, alas, usually to die— possibly after crossing a road or two.

When your local fishmonger or waiter distinguishes me as “wild,” you should know that it is a loose category indeed. The eight living species of me—seven in the Pacific—blur boundaries enough that an Atlantic salmon is actually more closely related to a trout from the Northeast than to a salmon from the Pacific, while Pacific salmon are more closely tied to West Coast rainbow trout than to Atlantic salmon.