Red caviar fish gives only once in a lifetime

Fish chum - this is the brooding fish of the familysalmonids. In Russia, in terms of catch volumes, it is only slightly inferior to pink salmon. In 2009, more than 90,000 tons were caught by the industrial method of this fish. Lives in the northern waters of the Pacific for 3 to 5 years, by eating meat and fat, then goes into rivers and rises to the birthplace, overcoming up to 2000 km, even jumping over rapids and waterfalls several meters high. How this fish finds a birthplace - scientists have not yet figured out. Some believe that she remembers the "smell of the house." Others think that they remember the taste of the brook water, in which it hatched from the eggs. Still others assume that it is guided by a magnetic field.

Fish chum salmon is going to spawn late in the autumn and happens,that eggs spawn under the ice of the already frozen river. In fresh water nothing eats, but consumes fat at first from the fat fin - a fat-filled leather build-up near the tail, and then from the body itself. Before spawning, it is so thin that it is only suitable for fish meal or canned food. If at the entrance to the river its fat content is from 9 to 11%, then after spawning - less than 0,2 - 0,5%. In addition, meat in this life stage in the chum becomes flabby. Therefore, it is tasty when caught in the sea or in the coastal parts of the rivers at the beginning of the course.

Many representatives of the salmon family havetwo forms of existence: the entrance and living. For example, the fish of sockeye salmon forms both a continuous form and a living form. Residential formed in isolated lakes and is called kokani. Steelheaded salmon has both a passageway and a residential form, as well as a stream and lake trout.

Fish chum is a checkpoint, because allshe spends life in the sea, and in adulthood "passes" into the rivers for spawning. It refers to the salmon species of the Pacific Ocean, which die after spawning. Why are they dying? There are several versions. The first. How to her, who lived in the sea and fed on plankton, crayfish and small marine fish, to feed themselves in the river with worms, snails, crayfish, freshwater fish? The second. Sea fish, having gone a long way without food, spun out, has no more strength. Therefore, having given offspring, completes the earthly existence. There are other versions, but they are not proven to this day.

On the special properties of red caviar, which givesfish chum salmon and other salmon are known on both sides of the Pacific Ocean by people and animals, including bears: our brown bears, and black Alaskan, and Kodiak grizzly giants, and Japanese black and brown. Salmon spawns go to spawn in autumn, when bears make their fat reserves for the winter. Best for this is the red fish. Therefore, the bears on the rivers draw their paws, going in huge numbers.

With abundance of fish, like real gourmets, theyeat caviar and head, and the rest is thrown on the shore. In the beginning of the 20th century, the famous researcher of the Ussuri region, V.K. Arsenyev and his no less famous conductor Dersu Uzala, escaped from starvation by a bear. This is reported in different ways on the Internet. But VK Arsenyev himself wrote that they ate not "bearish scraps", but full parts of carcasses.

Bears do not just prefer caviar.They feel with an animal instinct that it contains up to 20% of proteins and virtually no carbohydrates. And vitamins are difficult to count. The scientists found out that in the caviar and in the meat of the chum salmon they contain: retinol, folic and ascorbic acid, thiamin, riboflavin, calciferol, as well as macro- and microelements: potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, calcium, etc. It is interesting that thiamin is a protector from toxic the effects of alcohol and tobacco. If such a fish is regularly present in your menu, then expensive vitamins will not be needed. In it, the most complete composition of those substances that are necessary for the normal life of living organisms. And in caviar they are even greater.

What a fish it is!

Photo of a man with a catch: the chum caught in Alaska during the course of spawning and weighs 15 kg.

The woman in the photo has a silver chum (sea form of chum), caught there in the coastal zone of the sea, weighs 13.5 kg.

Any kind of salmon caught inthe river in Kamchatka, Chukotka, the Kola Peninsula, in Ladoga or Onega Lake, is truly priceless. Well, you can buy fish, chilled or frozen, in the supermarket. The price for ketu ranges from 50 to 75 - 80 rubles / kg.