More Atlantic salmon could be in the Penobscot watershed than you think

I caught a mystery fish through the ice while fishing alone at Seboeis Lake many years ago. It was a salmon, sort of. But it looked nothing like the fat, sassy landlocked salmon that I had come to know from my winters at Seboeis Lake.

It was a big, kype-jawed male, but a malnourished fish with more head than body.

Hmmm, I wondered to myself. Could this be an old broodstock fish that the state put in the lake just to get rid of, which had been done before in some other bodies of water?

“In the 1990s the Atlantic Salmon Commission gave IFW some captive broodstock that they were not going to use any more for egg production. We then stocked a number of waters with these retired brood Atlantic salmon in late fall,” according to state fisheries biologist Greg Burr.

Branch, Eagle and Mopang lakes were among those that received them, but they didn’t do well and got skinny and most died within months, he said. Only a few lasted until spring, and the ones anglers caught were shaped like a smelt.

I never solved the Seboeis Lake riddle, nor did I ever catch another one like it there.

Looking back, in context of what we now know, my mystery fish may well have been a sea-run Atlantic salmon that had somehow migrated its way up the various waterways into the lake.

A few years later, an ice fisherman on West Pond in Ebeemee caught a fish that a fisheries biologist confirmed to have been a bona fide Atlantic salmon.

Then, just this winter, a woman fishing at Schoodic Lake caught a large salmon through the ice. That fish was also later confirmed to be an Atlantic salmon by the Enfield fisheries biologist.

And interestingly, Jason Smith, an underwater drone hobbyist from Milo, has some fascinating subsurface video of Atlantic salmon vying for spawning rights with some smaller landlocked salmon at the lake outlet in November. Check out his Youtube footage at Maine Freshwater Exploration .

If you are a curious sort like me, all of this begets the question: How many of these Atlantics are actually getting up the Penobscot River tributaries and into Maine lakes? Historically regarded as an anomaly or a fluke, is this fisheries event more commonplace than we once thought?

So far this year, a little more than 200 Atlantic salmon have been tallied at the fish passage counting station on the Penobscot River. When you think about it, isn’t it a wonder of Nature that these spectacular fish can make it so far from the sea and bridge over so many barriers, natural and manmade, and wind up in one of our northern inland lakes?

Another question that came to my mind was: “Will Atlantic salmon breed with landlocked salmon?” Why not? DNA wise, they are identical fish.

Landlocked and Atlantic salmon can spawn with each other but usually Atlantic spawn earlier in mid-September. Landlocked spawn at the end of September and into November, Burr said.

“This is why Atlantic salmon biologists always worry about landlocked salmon superimposing their redds [nests] over the top of the Atlantic’s redds,” he said.

We know that the ancestors of Maine’s landlocked Sebago salmon once lived at sea. If you watch Smith’s video footage of the Schoodic Lake spawning ballet, the largest of the male leapers is a fin-punched Atlantic who is competing with male landlockeds for the spawning rights.

This means that possibly in a few years, the salmon you catch at Schoodic Lake could be the mixed progeny of a landlocked fish and a sea-run Atlantic.

Who would-a-thunk it?

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network.