Salmon

Salmon are fish in the family Salmonidae, a group that also includes trout, char, grayling, and whitefish. In everyday usage, “salmon” most often refers to the Atlantic salmon (genus Salmo) and the Pacific salmon (genus Oncorhynchus), native to the temperate and subarctic North Atlantic and North Pacific regions, respectively. Many salmon are anadromous; they hatch and spend their early life in freshwater, migrate to the ocean to grow, and then return to freshwater to spawn, but some populations are landlocked/freshwater-resident for their entire lives. Most Pacific salmon die after spawning, while Atlantic salmon can sometimes survive spawning and return to sea, with a smaller fraction returning to spawn again.