Most fish, including trout and salmon, lay unfertilized eggs. The eggs are fertilized externally by the male. Fish typically release hundred or even millions of eggs, which increases the chance that a few offspring will survive into adulthood.

Salmon fish eggs are also called salmon roe, which is the reddish-orange eggs found inside the bellies of female salmon. The eggs will develop and hatch into baby fish if the fish was never caught.

Salmon Eggs Salmon lay their eggs in many streams and rivers. Depending on the species, a female salmon will lay anywhere from 1,500 to 7,000 eggs in a nest or redd she has created by making a shallow depression in the stream bottom. The male fertilizes the eggs and then both fish push gravel over them to protect them.

Salmon release their eggs and milt back into the freshwater to re-seed the cycle. Eggs that don’t get buried in the gravel become immediately available as food for other fish, birds and insects. After spawning the salmon die, and as they decay valuable nutrients are released.

Most zombie fish die within days of spawning, but some can last up to a couple of weeks. Once they die in the river, they are eaten by animals, or they decompose and add nutrients to the river. The Pacific salmon is a classic example of a semelparous animal.

Salmon go through a variety of stages during their life cycle. The main stages are: egg, alevin, fry, fingerling, smolt, ocean adult, and spawning adult.

Smoltification (also known as Parr-Smolt transformation) is a complex series of physiological changes where young salmonid fish adapt from living in fresh water to living in seawater.

The smoltification process is stimulated by a photoperiodic cue, that is, the lengthening of the photoperiod in the spring (Zydlewski et al., 2014).

The Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is a species of ray-finned fish in the family Salmonidae. It is the 3rd largest of the Salmonidae and can grow up to a meter in length….