By Tristin Hopper
Getting tired of singledom? Don’t like e-dating? Can’t thing of anything to say on the first date? Hey, just be glad you’re not a salmon.
Every summer on the Yukon River, thousands of salmon undergo what is arguably nature’s most horrifying mating ritual. For starters, as soon as the fish take their first mouthful of fresh water, their bodies begin to twist mutate. Pink salmon warp into rivergoing Quasimodos; within days they develop humpbacks and violently-hooked noses. Chinooks turn bright red. Compared to this kind of nightmarish disfigurement, puberty is a cake walk.
Swimming against the current, Yukon River salmon have to travel as much as 3,000 kilometers to their childhood spawning grounds. They don’t eat and they don’t rest – driven solely by fat reserves and a fanatical drive to keep swimming. After as many as 6 fin-shredding weeks - the fish arrive at their final destination. The female shoots out her eggs, the male ejaculates onto them and within weeks, they’re dead – their eyeballs quickly pecked out by nearby birds.
This is a mating quest with no human equivalent. Imagine if, to lose your virginity you had to go without food for a month and then sprint a marathon through a crocodile-infested minefield. In a way it’s almost romantic; a river filled with doomed salmon lovers limping towards their inevitable demise. In August, this aquatic sex parade is expected to pull into Whitehorse – dazzling onlookers with their flamboyant red cloaks. By then, the salmon will have swum more than 3,000 kilometers - roughly the distance between Yellowknife and Northern California.
The sheer complexity of the salmon spawn is what makes Yukon River salmon so vulnerable to collapse (which, by the way, they are). The fish now splashing across the Yukon-Alaska border are the last remnants of a gauntlet of deadly obstacles. They’ve been accidentally snared by Pollock fishers, they’ve been riddled by heart disease, and they’ve even been Cuisinart-ed by river-going jet boats. Not to mention the toxic sewage, polluted mine waste grizzly bears and thousands of salmon-hungry Northerners.
Salmon, it turns out, take reproduction very, very seriously. Think of them the next time you’re stuck in an awkward blind date.
