Salmon

salmon of which there are six well-known species, in the family Salmonidae, all belong to the northern waters of the northern hemisphere. The fish which have been called ‘salmon’ in Australia and S. Africa are not salmon at all.

The most famous salmon is Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon, whose range extended in times past from Portugal up to Norway and across by Greenland to N. America, probably down to the Hudson River. However, the life-cycle of this fish is such that it has increasingly come up against man-made obstacles in the last two centuries and is now not found at all in some places where it formerly abounded. The modern solution is to farm the fish (see aquaculture), described below.