I may have seen part of this process. Two decades ago I was lucky enough to get to visit Alaska, and I saw a sight that was indelible: huge piles of fresh-looking (not rotted in any way) fish being completely ignored by the masses of seagulls that filled the harbor I was touring.
I asked why the delicious-looking fish–salmon that had gone through the spawning stage of their lives–were being ignored by clearly-hungry birds. The answer was that the flesh of the fish was essentially poison (or at least not nutritious) to the birds–it smelled wrong, and the birds wouldn’t touch it.
Most salmon spend their early life in fresh water, then make their way to the ocean, they are called anadromous fish. Part of life in fresh, most of it in the ocean salt water, like 3 or 4 years, returning home to spawn and end their life. There are some, like young jack salmon that will follow the older fish in and return to the ocean, and others like steelhead who may retrun and come back, but these are very lucky fish.
It is their life cycle. When the time for them comes, they will use all of their energy to try to get back to the area where they were born, to fuck once and then die. And no, they don’t return the the exact stream where they were born, that is a myth, but they can smell and remember the local estuary that their home stream empties into, and that is close enough.
That’s being generous. Female dumps eggs into river gravel, male squirts his mojo over the area, then they both go off to die separately. No foreplay, no cigarette afterward. If they end up in a hatchery, even those steps are done artificially, but the outcome is the same.
Here’s a video for our local hatchery that shows the process (the artificial method) - about 15 min, but the salmon breeding is the first half. Sadly, it doesn’t quite say what happens to the salmon afterward - I hope they end up back in the river somehow.
Nailed it in one. I’ve seen salmon after they’ve been fighting upstream to the spawning ground. Not a pretty sight. They’re literally falling apart at that point, with just enough energy left to lay eggs and fertilize before dying. As they swim upstream female pink salmon usually form a hump and become known as “humpies”.
It has, I believe, been often remarked, that a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg. Every creature must be allowed to “run” its own development in its own way; the egg’s way may seem a very roundabout manner of doing things; but it is its way, and it is one of which man, upon the whole, has no great reason to complain. Why the fowl should be considered more alive than the egg, and why it should be said that the hen lays the egg, and not that the egg lays the hen, these are questions which lie beyond the power of philosophic explanation…
The 5 species of Pacific salmon in North America all invariably die after returning to fresh water and spawning (or in the case of kokanee sockeye salmon, moving from fresh water to fresh water). Their distant relatives the Atlantic salmon may survive to spawn again, but it is still a hard process, so they can survive but may not. A closer relative of Pacific salmon, the steelhead (same species as rainbow trout) similarly may survive but a good deal don’t.
The female digs a small “nest” and deposits unfertilized eggs, the male then uhh adds his own contribution. The eggs aren’t really loose, they’re contained in roe sack.
