My Life

My name is Andy and I am an Atlantic Salmon but the scientist call me Salmo Salar. I'm 27 inches in size and weigh about 12lbs. When I was a young fry, I was burried in the gravel for about six weeks; then, I raised from the gravel about halfway and started feeding on plankton and small invertebrates. After my weeks of being a fry, I became an Emergrent Fry, also known as a redd.  In this phase of my life,  I left my nest in the gravel, developed camouflage stripes along my sides, and entered the stage of becoming a parr. Now, when I was a parr,  I spent 3 years in fresh water and went through a smoltification, which is a physiolgical transformation that prepared me for the real world, "The Marine Habitat". In spring, when my training was over, me and others left the marine rivers and took a long exciting journey to Newfoundland and Labrador which took us by mid-summer to get there. When we got there we spent our first winter out at sea south of Greenland, after the first winter at sea a small portion left to return to Maine because they missed home, and the rest of us spent a second year at sea. My reason I didn't go back home to maine is because I felt like I still had more to see and experience out at sea. During my second year I fed off the southwest to a much less extent which was the southeast coast of Greenland.  There, I ran into some Maine salmon, and I made friends with most of them and some even treated me like they were my family. After my second year at sea I felt like it was time for me to return back to the fresh waters where i had come from to spawn. Now a year later I live in the Gulf of Maine which is temperate.