Redds - Spawning Grounds

Spawning Grounds

Spawning grounds are the areas of water where aquatic animals spawn, or produce their eggs. After spawning, the spawn may or may not drift to new grounds which become their nursery grounds. Many species undertake migrations each year, and sometimes great migrations, to reach their spawning grounds. For example, lakes and river watersheds can be major spawning grounds for anadromous fish such as salmon. These days, it is often necessary to construct fish ladders and other bypass systems so salmon can navigate their way past hydroelectric dams on their way to spawning grounds. Coastal fish often use mangroves and estuaries as spawning grounds, while reef fish can find adjacent seagrass meadows that make good spawning grounds. Short-finned eels can travel anything up to three or four thousand kilometres to their spawning ground in deep water somewhere in the Coral Sea.

Forage fish often make great migrations between their spawning, feeding and nursery grounds. Schools of a particular stock usually travel in a triangle between these grounds. For example, one stock of herrings have their spawning ground in southern Norway, their feeding ground in Iceland, and their nursery ground in northern Norway. Wide triangular journeys such as these may be important because forage fish, when feeding, cannot distinguish their own offspring.

Capelin are a forage fish of the smelt family found in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. In summer, they graze on dense swarms of plankton at the edge of the ice shelf. Larger capelin also eat krill and other crustaceans. The capelin move inshore in large schools to spawn and migrate in spring and summer to feed in plankton rich areas between Iceland, Greenland, and Jan Mayen. The migration is affected by ocean currents. Around Iceland maturing capelin make large northward feeding migrations in spring and summer. The return migration takes place in September to November. The spawning migration starts north of Iceland in December or January.

The diagram on the right shows the main spawning grounds and larval drift routes. Capelin on the way to feeding grounds is coloured green, capelin on the way back is blue, and the breeding grounds are red. In a paper published in 2009, researchers from Iceland recount their application of an interacting particle model to the capelin stock around Iceland, successfully predicting the spawning migration route for 2008.

Referred to as "the greatest shoal on earth", the sardine run occurs when millions of sardines migrate from their spawning grounds south of the southern tip of Africa northward along the Eastern Cape coastline. Chinook salmon make the longest freshwater migration of any salmon, over 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) up the Yukon River to spawning grounds upstream of Whitehorse, Yukon. Some green sea turtles swim more than 2,600 kilometres (1,600 mi) to reach their spawning grounds.