Furthermore, it's the reason that salmon at that stage are a sought after delicacy: the flesh itself is more tender as it is decaying in a unique, stable process during the migration upstream, and makes for a completely different flavor and texture.
Are there restrictions? I'd think it's a bad time to catch them right before they mate, if we're trying to keep population levels up.
No offense, but that opinion is clearly uneducated or misinformed; the sheer numbers that die en route from genetic inferiority completely dwarf the combined numbers of those taken by predators along the way — including humans. Furthermore, fishing for salmon during their spawning season is as much a test of an angler's skill as it is about their wilderness survival fluency. Every single predator in that biome is out for salmon if they can get it, and many of them give little to no fucks at all about disemboweling the competition — including humans. Couple that with the fact that the male salmon have a singular, monosyllabic purpose and it's mostly the females that are taking in food at any opportunity (unless you fashion a bait ball of salmon eggs for the males to instinctively destroy as a threat), and you've got yourself one helluva challenge on several fronts.
Wait, salmon has a season?
Bears know.
Salt & Pepper at the very least. Lemon juice is nice as well
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Possibly dumb question: Does salmon taste different when eaten before and after spawning?
They're basically a pile of mush by the end of their run, about to keel over and die. They don't have any fat and the muscles have been mostly used for energy as well. It gets significantly fishier smelling too, but like, not in a good way.
Some people like it. My dogs used to like to yank our shoulders out of the sockets on walks, trying to go roll around in the ones that flopped on to shore to die. That's not fun to scrub out of an excitable labrador.
Why do they have to go all the way back "home" to mate, though?
Probably because their offspring survive better in the freshwater streams than the ocean that they'll live in later in life.
Evolution is a crazy bitch
Ayyyyy
Thanks @sharkfucker420
Spawn and Die
