The thousands of sportsmen and commercial fishermen who take salmon from northern Pacific waters generally pay scant attention to the circumstances that make their harvest possible. They are more interested in the catching and eating than they are in studying the life-cycle of this large, handsome fish. Yet, accompanying each mature salmon making its way back to the creek or pool in which it was spawned are mysteries so great we can only term them miraculous.
Consider, if you will, that as infants those same fish swam as much as hundreds of miles downstream to the ocean. Then as they grew up they traversed thousands of miles of open sea. And, according to their species, they may be gone for as little as a year, or as long as four years. Pink salmon return to spawn after 12 to 14 months, having traveled some 3,000 to 4,000 miles at sea. Sockeye salmon repeat a 2,000-mile circuit every year for three years before heading inland to their spawning grounds. And Chinook salmon may be at sea for four years before turning toward home. (The incredible Salmon, Clarence P. Idyll, The National Geographic, Vol. 134, No. 2, August, 1968, p. 202)
Regardless of how long they have been gone, or where they are when they receive the mysterious biological signal that it is time to breed, the salmon follow a precise time schedule. Though they may approach the home estuary from a hundred different compass points, and be as much as 1,200 miles away when the call comes, almost all healthy salmon of the same species arrive within a three-week period. One such run, estimated at 50 million Sockeye salmon, gathered within that three-week period in Alaska’s Bristol Bay every year of a recent 10-year survey.
But their sense of timing is only one of the mysteries concerning salmon. Perhaps a greater mystery is how they find their way back across the trackless ocean to the correct estuary, and then up-river, taking only the correct forks, until the tiny tributary which will return them to the place of their birth is reached. How do they do it?
Strangely enough, the answer seems to be: they smell their way home! It is hard to believe that the odor of the “home pool” could persist through successive dilutions of the confluences of the waters, from creeks to streams to small rivers to major rivers, and at last to the ocean itself. Nevertheless, if salmon are deprived of their sense of smell, they are utterly unable to locate the correct stream from the several choices they must make. Researchers have tested this by removing the olfactory organs from a number of salmon and then releasing them. No longer were they able to “sniff” their way up the scent trail. (Water, the Wonder of Life, Rutherford Platt, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., p. 188)
The baby salmon are imprinted with the smell of their birth waters within about a week of hatching, and they never forget it. This odor is a composite derived from decaying roots and other plant life, plus living and dead insects in the water, and finally, dissolved mineral crystals from sand and pebbles lining the bottom. The particular “mix” is unique for each location, and while we might not be able to tell the difference, the salmon rarely miss.
Still another mystery is what motivates these fish to struggle against swift currents, sometimes leaping 8 or 9 feet in the air to clear waterfalls or climb fish ladders, exhausting and often battering themselves for the privilege of propagating the next generation, and then dying – for unlike other fish, including its Atlantic cousin, the Pacific salmon invariably dies shortly after breeding.
We are left with several questions: How can Salmon find the path, even out in the wide ocean? How do they know when the time has come to go home? And why will only their birthplace do for their spawning bed, when hundreds of similar sites are available, many of them closer than their own?
Science can only suggest answers. The odor of the natal spawning beds are believed to remain detectable even when mingled with 10,000 other smells and diluted in the vast ocean. The time signal is thought to be sent by hormones operating in the body. And the powerful homing instinct that can only be satisfied by the waters of each fish’s nativity is believed to be somehow connected to a survival trait in the species.
We will not say that these answers are far-fetched. But they do, on sober reflection, seem to require greater miracles than the one simple miracle of divine creation. God can make anything happen, including showing the salmon its path toward home, and motivating it to fulfill its function in life.
God cad also show man his pathway to his proper heavenly home. As the Bible says: “You will show me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy. In your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.” (Psalm 16:11)
Furthermore, this path of life for man includes illumination of our purpose in existing. The Bible also states that “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10)
So what God does routinely for the salmon, He is desirous of doing for us. But if we would indeed be guided by God, we must first obey the instinctive signal built into each of us that it is time to turn toward “home” – that is, heaven. Let us seek our God!
(All Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible translation.)