Fish ID (not Atlantic salmon...) help,"River of the Garnet Sands"

Cabezon

Sculpin Enterprises
Forum Supporter
While I had to skip this year's near-annual trip to the "River of the Garnet Sands", a friend of mine and his son just returned from a great trip. In addition to the usual Westslope cutts, they encountered a school of silvery salmonids that they could not originally identify. They finally decided that these were juvenile Kokanee (silvery body, lack of spots, large eye). Here is a picture.
UnidentifiedSalmonid7244.jpg
What are your thoughts?
Steve
[P.S., I am confident that this is an Atlantic salmon.]
 

Cabezon

Sculpin Enterprises
Forum Supporter
i see a salmon smolt. it would be over my head to know which species between coho or kokanee. those would be my two guesses. not a trout, imo.
There are no reports of coho is this system but there are Kokanee. Interestingly, I have fished here 20+ years and never encountered anything like they did on this trip (which is later in summer than the normal trip).
Steve
 

ABITNF

Steelhead
Tough to detect from the photo but the eye on sockeye, or in this case the land-locked variety, kokanee, is closer to the upper jaw bone than in coho. And, although it's hard do distinguish, sockeye lack spots on the back and upper tail like coho have so this is a kokanee.

Here is a link to the PDF version of J.L. Hart's Pacific Fishes of Canada: https://science-libraries.canada.ca/eng/search/?q=pacific+fishes+of+canada&sm=1

It's well worth obtaining in hardcover but is getting scarce. This is the next best thing.
 
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JACKspASS

Steelhead
Kokanee usually run up rivers and spawn in Sept/Oct. Maybe it's an early fish making the treck to spawning grounds? Pretty cool to catch a chrome one, the ones I always see and inadvertently catch are always red
 

Cabezon

Sculpin Enterprises
Forum Supporter
Kokanee usually run up rivers and spawn in Sept/Oct. Maybe it's an early fish making the treck to spawning grounds? Pretty cool to catch a chrome one, the ones I always see and inadvertently catch are always red
These were not adult fish, but juveniles, just a few inches long. These fish were at least 100 river miles upstream from a large lake.
Steve
 

SilverFly

Life of the Party
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These were not adult fish, but juveniles, just a few inches long. These fish were at least 100 river miles upstream from a large lake.
Steve
Interesting. I had always assumed sockeye and kokes didn't linger in their birth rivers long after hatching.
 

Otter

Steelhead
Tough to detect from the photo but the eye on sockeye, or in this case the land-locked variety, kokanee, is closer to the upper jaw bone than in coho. And, although it's hard do distinguish, sockeye lack spots on the back and upper tail like coho have so this is a kokanee.

Here is a link to the PDF version of J.L. Hart's Pacific Fishes of Canada: https://science-libraries.canada.ca/eng/search/?q=pacific+fishes+of+canada&sm=1

It's well worth obtaining in hardcover but is getting scarce. This is the next best thing.
Thanks for the link to the online version of Hart. That book is one of my two main texts from school, along with Scott & Crossman, "Freshwater Fishes Of Canada". Both are also very useful for the northwest U.S.

I would just add that a juvenile coho only a few inches long, far upstream from saltwater, would be far more colourful, not be totally silver, and would also be deeper in body shape than that fish.
Link:
 

John Svahn

Steelhead
Forum Supporter
At first I thought Kokanee for sure but agree with the above post that the eye/jaw orientation is not similar to any Koke I have caught. Also, that eye looks trouty. Sometimes the rainbow fingerlings stocked in the reservoir by our house have spots that are barely discernible and a purplish sheen.
 
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