Other closely related fish in the same family include trout , char , grayling , whitefish , lenok and taimen , all coldwater fish of the subarctic and cooler temperate regions with some sporadic endorheic populations in Central Asia.
Salmon are typically anadromous : they hatch in the shallow gravel beds of freshwater headstreams and spend their juvenile years in rivers , lakes and freshwater wetlands , migrate to the ocean as adults and live like sea fish , then return to their freshwater birthplace to reproduce.
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However, populations of several species are restricted to fresh waters i. Folklore has it that the fish return to the exact stream where they themselves hatched to spawn , and tracking studies have shown this to be mostly true.
A portion of a returning salmon run may stray and spawn in different freshwater systems; the percent of straying depends on the species of salmon. Salmon are important food fish and are intensively farmed in many parts of the world, [ 4 ] with Norway being the world's largest producer of farmed salmon, followed by Chile.
The unpronounced "l" absent from Middle English was later added as a Latinisation to make the word closer to its Latin root. The seven commercially important species of salmon occur in two genera of the subfamily Salmoninae. The genus Salmo contains the Atlantic salmon , found in both sides of the North Atlantic , as well as more than 40 other species commonly named as trout. The genus Oncorhynchus contains 12 recognised species which occur naturally only in the North Pacific, six of which are known as Pacific salmon while the remainder are considered trout.
