Cool facts about salmon.... Check it out!!!

I am an Environmental Sciences student at the University of Minnesota Duluth, here are a few really fascinating facts worth learning to impress you fishing buddies and show off a little bit!  I always wondered why the male salmon and steelhead had those unique lock jaws, as well as how bizzare it was that they instinctevely reproduce at the exact same place at which they themselves were produced as offspring...... Well, I did a little research and I am more than happy to let all of the other "fishing minds" besides myself know!

1.) Question:  Why do male steelhead/salmon have teeth in their migration up river? Also, why do they have "hooked/lock jaws"?  
      Answer:  Believe it or not before the spawning process takes place, male salmon and steelhead actually do not have these characteristics.   They go through a "morphism", and transform.  The reason for this is simply competition, each male fish wants to be the most dominant and produce as much offspring as possible.  The lock jaw and sharp jagged edge teeth form as a way to steer off other male salmon and steelhead away from them, so that they can obtain "fitness"....In other words.....so that they can reproduce in massive quantities so that we have many more salmon and steelhead in generations to come.  So "Live and Lock Jaw!"

2.) Question:  How are Chinook Salmon able to find that exact place that they themselves as offspring were born, and reproduce in the same stretch of H2O? 
     Answer:  There are a couple of resons for this.  The first reason is that Chinook Salmon go through a process when they are born, they rear in the river for when they are young, in the "smolt" stage of life.  These salmon have incredible scent development, and are able to remeber those scents of when they were young.  This has been proven with experiments with a synthetic chemical called "morpholine" that many fisheries experts have dabbled with and put in the rivers in place of their "smolt smell".  Also, the most bizzare and really interesting piece of this puzzle is that Chinook salmon have a tiny deposit of iron in their brain, what this iron deposit does is tracks them along a magnetic field and acts almost like a compass, to identify the stretch of water where they themselves were born in a big cluster of spawn....


I just thought others that loved fishing as much as me mind find this quite fascinating!