The Perfect Couple

A hen steelhead can migrate up a river, make a depression—a redd-- in the gravel for her eggs, deposited as a male steelhead fertilizes them, and return to the ocean looking hardly worse for the wear. I’ve caught such fish and been startled to discover they’ve spawned because they appear quite bright though the ventral area will be depressed. Conversely, the male steelhead is polygamous and will hang around its spawning area searching for a female to spawn with until they’re reddish, drab, and looking beat up from the fights with other males. As a result, the probability of males returning to the ocean to recover and spawn another time is greatly reduced. Among the typical three salt male steelhead in British Columbia’s Skeena watershed, none will return to spawn again. 

With this in mind, I present the perfect couple.

Pictured Top - A mint-bright summer-run female steelhead from the Skeena River system in British Columba is the ideal vision of what devout anglers imagine when we think steelhead—sleek, fat, chrome, simply beautiful. Nearly a century after Steller saw his steelhead, Meredith Gairdner, a young graduate of the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine volunteered as a Hudson’s Bay Company surgeon and sailed to British Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. One of his directives was to study the flora and fauna of the region—including fish. He, too, “discovered” steelhead. Thus, since 1836, Salmo gairdneri. For 200 years anyway.

Pictured Bottom - Completes the perfect couple—a complementary male steelhead, coloring up and readying for the redds, also from a Skeena tributary. To continue the story of the steelhead’s classification, in 1989 the American Fisheries Society determined that, Salmo mykiss and S. gairdneri being the same critter, precedence in naming called for the earlier Russian to become the universal name of rainbow trout and, yes, its anadromous form, steelhead. While they were at it, the scientists said that morphological and genetic studies determined that S. mykiss is evolutionarily closer to Pacific species of salmon than to the Salmo brown trout and Atlantic salmon. Hence, welcome mykiss to the Oncorhynchus clan—from the Greek onkos (“hook”) andrynchos (“nose”) for the severe kype that coho and the others develop before spawning. Most male or “buck” steelhead spawn rigorously and repeatedly to their deaths.