Mondo Knows Facts
Salmon find their home river by smell
They remember the chemical signature of the water where they hatched Fish that migrate to sea for years then swim back upstream, leaping obstacles. Experiments with trained fish showed they respond to home water cues. The final miles are guided by odour, and upstream traffic attracts bears and eagles. It sits in Mondo's animals collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Kiwis are the only birds with nostrils at the tip of their beakKiwis rely heavily on smell to hunt underground earthworms at night.A dog has around 300 million scent receptorsHumans carry closer to six million, and dogs dedicate far more brain to smellEuropean eels breed in the Sargasso SeaNo one has watched them spawn there, only found their smallest larvaeSome swifts stay airborne for monthsRadio tracking shows common swifts flying without landing for most of the non-breeding seasonArctic terns complete the longest migration of any animalArctic terns fly about 90,000 kilometres annually from pole to pole.Monarch butterfly migration spans four distinct generationsThe butterflies returning south in autumn have never been there before.
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Tags: fish, migration, smell
Salmon find their home river by smell: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- They remember the chemical signature of the water where they hatched. The figure is taken from NOAA Fisheries, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a animals fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Animals shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.