I save the heads and skeletal carcasses of my salmon after filleting.
The skeleton can be scraped and scraps used in a wide variety of ways (salmon dip, anyone? chowder? fish cakes?).
Then that’s saved and vacuum packed with the head for my wife’s nail-lady, Julie, a pert Vietnamese mother who has her own great soup and stew recipes, staples in southeast Asian (and central and east European, too) cuisine.
Nothing but the tail and fins go to waste.
But when I shipped off a package with a couple of soup kits with my wife in October, one of the heads was missing a section of the nose; which, as one might imagine, made Julie-the-nail-lady curious.
Fortunately, that section of the upper snout isn’t a significant contributor to the soup, but it sure looks funny.
What happened?
The salmon was chipped, as many, if not all of you know. More technically, it carried a coded wire tag, placed there in a hatchery to help biologists track tons of information – where the fish go, where they’re caught, age, etc. Fish checkers also collect information such as length, girth, sex and even take scale samples, growth rings of which can be read like those of trees.
I caught this one at Buoy 10, filled in a postcard with my address and less than two months later the results were mailed to me.
How do they do that? (Hmm…might make a good reality television segment.)
It’s pretty simple for everyone except the baby hatchery salmon.
That little guy/gal was summarily grabbed from its happy pond place, had its adipose fin clipped and then was given a slight headache with the injection of a chip by a special little gun.
The chip goes into a location that doesn’t affect the fish (misses the brain).
It’s metal so can be detected during it’s return by the fish checker, who waves a magic wand that sings before your supper.
A section is sent to a research lab (this one probably went to the Clackamas office of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife).
Then things get really crazy.
The lab tech also has scanning equipment and begins hacking away at the snout, discarding sections that don’t sing, reducing the search bit by bit until the tag, about the size of a wasp’s stinger (maybe smaller), is located and placed under a microscope.
And then things get even crazier.
That teeny little tag carries a unique set of numbers, recorded at the hatchery during the inoculation process.
Not even Dr. Google or AI can easily tell me how they do that, but they do – probably with a microscopic laser beam…Or Lilliputians with teeny etching tools (although they may use “specialty tools” as alleged by AI).
Even the codes are coded, with identifiers for the agency and other secret Lilliputian information. Coded wire tags are not to be confused with PIT tags, or “Passive Integrated Transponders.”
PIT tags, are larger, with internal microchips activated when passing close to a special antenna, either at a dam or passage facility or a wand, for example. The antenna can be connected to a computer that records the identity of the tag and the time it passed by the antenna.
If that little guy/gal was really unlucky at the hatchery, it would also have had a larger PIT tag injected into its stomach cavity.
And if it was really, REALLY unlucky, it would have been eaten by a cormorant or Caspian tern, then the tag would have been pooped out in a nesting area – also providing important information about depredation.
Poop or not, PIT tags are reusable.
Coded wire tags are not.
Now about those soup recipes…
Not every fish gets checked for a coded wire tag, so it’s entirely possible some of Julie’s gourmet soups contain an undetectable surprise – unless the hostess has a magic wand in her kitchen.
It’s enough to make a Lilliputian chuckle.
Listen closely though…they’re not very loud.