Types of Salmon: The Five Pacific Species and the Atlantic, Told Apart

There are six types of salmon a North American angler can meet: five Pacific salmon (chinook, coho, sockeye, pink and chum) and the Atlantic salmon. The U.S. Geological Survey counts seven Pacific species in all; the other two, masu and amago, live only in Asia. Below: how to tell the six apart by gum line and tail, how big each gets, where you can fish for it, and the record for each.

Alaska teaches the five Pacific salmon on one hand. Thumb rhymes with chum. The pointer can poke an eye: sockeye. The middle finger is the biggest: king. The ring finger wears silver: coho. The pinky is pink.

Start here

• Coho salmon: the white gum line, the fall runs from Alaska to Lake Ontario, and why the world record came from New York.
• Steelhead: the sea-run rainbow trout that shares the salmon rivers and is often counted with them.
• Water temperature for fishing: where salmon and trout feed, in one chart with 23 other species.

The six salmon, side by side

The gum line and the tail work on a silver fish fresh from the sea or the lake, when all salmon look alike. The marks are those on the Alaska and Washington identification cards.

Two salmon have black gums, chinook and pink, and they are the easiest pair to separate: a pink is small and its tail spots are large ovals. Two have no spots on the tail at all, sockeye and chum; the chum has real teeth and the sockeye almost none.

Chinook: the king

The largest salmon. A typical adult is about 3 ft long and 30 lb, and Alaska’s profile lists fish to 58 in (147 cm) and 126 lb (57 kg). Chinook mature anywhere from two to seven years old. They range from Monterey Bay to the Chukchi Sea and, since Michigan began stocking them in 1967, through the Great Lakes.

Coho: the silver

The coho is the three-year salmon of small coastal streams, and the fish that opened the Great Lakes salmon fishery in 1966. It swims in all five Great Lakes today.

Sockeye: the red

Sockeye have almost no teeth, the mark that separates a silver sockeye from a silver chum. A sockeye that never goes to sea is a kokanee, and it rarely passes 14 in (37 cm). Sea-run fish live about five years and run from northwest Alaska to Oregon.

Pink: the humpy

The smallest and the most punctual. Every pink salmon lives exactly two years, so the fish of odd years and even years in the same stream never meet. In the Great Lakes pinks are a Lake Superior and St. Marys River fish.

Chum: the dog

Chum spawn at three to six years old and wear the loudest spawning pattern of the family, the calico bars. Spawning males grow canine-like teeth.

Atlantic salmon

The only salmon native to the Atlantic, and the only one of the six that can survive spawning and return to do it again. Fishing for sea-run Atlantic salmon is prohibited in the United States; the last wild runs are in Maine, and that population has been listed as endangered since 2000. What anglers catch is the landlocked form: Maine has it in more than 300 lakes, and Michigan stocks Atlantic salmon in Lake Huron, the St. Marys River and Torch Lake.

And the steelhead?

A steelhead is a rainbow trout that goes to sea. It belongs to the same genus as the Pacific salmon, runs the same rivers and is sometimes called the eighth salmon, but unlike them it does not have to die after spawning.

The record for each

Two of the six came from one Alaskan river, the Kenai, two years apart.

Which salmon are protected

On the Pacific coast, protection goes by population, not by species: NOAA lists nine chinook populations, four coho, two sockeye and two chum as endangered or threatened, and no pink salmon at all. On many West Coast waters that means a wild fish, with its small adipose fin intact, goes back. Check the rules for the river and the season before you keep any salmon.

Where to go next

• Trout: rainbow, brown, brook and lake trout, the salmon’s closest relatives.
• Fish species: every species guide in one place.