Old Grads' Return

In a bare concrete pool on the campus of the University of Washington, 15 silver salmon swam happily last week, their fancies turned to thoughts of mating and spawning. They were historic fish--the first salmon to return from the sea to an artificial pool.

The 15 were part of a batch of 26,000 fingerlings hatched at the University's Applied Fisheries Laboratory. The fingerlings were marked by having their fins clipped, and put in the concrete pool. After two weeks there, they were sluiced down a flume into Seattle's Lake Union, from where they found their way to the Pacific. Ever since, Dr. Lauren R. Donaldson, director of the laboratory, has wondered whether they would come back. Young salmon had often been successfully transferred from one watershed to another, but none had ever returned to anything as unhomelike as a concrete pool.

But the two-week stay was apparently enough to convince at least some of the fish that the pool was their home stream. They swam back from the sea and up Puget Sound, guided by their mysterious homing instinct, then struggled through Government fish ladders into Lake Union. When they reached their alma mater, they made a sharp left turn and climbed a ladder into the pool.

A hundred more of the marked salmon, averaging ten pounds each, have been caught by fishermen. Dr. Donaldson hopes that in the next few weeks 1% of the nurslings will have been accounted for, a sensational success in the salmon-nursing business. The faithful return of the alumni, says Dr. Donaldson, will start a new era in the study and culture of salmon. Instead of searching out the migrating salmon in rushing, intractable rivers, fish experts can now handle them as docile laboratory subjects.

Eventually, Dr. Donaldson hopes, man will learn how to raise salmon in "farms" near salt water. When the fingerlings are released, they will reach the sea quickly, dodging the many dangers that await their wild cousins on their journeys down long rivers. When they return from the sea, grown to full salmonhood, they won't have to waste their strength and flesh on battling the rapids. They can swim right into their home farms--and into tin cans.

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