Timing the Salmon
The salmon cannot think to find their food, escape from predators, migrate or spawn. They rely on exogenous cues and internal physiological processes to help them coordinate their behavior and events. These cues and processes tell the fish where and when they should be situated. Biologists have traditionally looked at the length of day, and temperature and flow of the water, to explain the behavior of these animals. The difficulties with these approaches are that day length is too flat from one week to the next to time an event and the weather is too variable. Author Bernie Taylor offers another explanation with his Biological Time hypothesis. He demonstrates that the salmon are entrained to reliable cues, which they are conditioned to from the earliest stages and carry throughout their lives. The author takes his hypothesis a step further by showing that these cues move in the solar year, giving us the impression that the migrations and events of the fish are early or late. Taylor also provides evidence that tribes in the Pacific Northwest have been following the principles to harvest salmon effectively in the estuaries and rivers. This tried and tested science is embedded in rituals and traditions that date back for centuries. There are many modern applications for this hypothesis ranging from developing better avian predator avoidance strategies, optimizing power generation during juvenile migration periods, more efficient counting of fish to more reliable forecasting of returning adults.
Bernie Taylor is the author of Biological Time.
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