Been doing alright on the town run in Eugene lately. Picked up a 28" buck last night that had a circular wound on his flank. Instead of scales it seemed to be skin, and it was colored like a trout in that one patch. The inside of the fillet was normal looking.

I'm thinking healed over lamprey bite? Any ideas?

Bullet hole.

Gang-banger steelhead.

My guess is you are right.

Recent graffiti activity and "urban campsites" at the trestle would back your hypothesis up, Dan. However it seems to be sponsored by the Springfield library:



Based on the oval nature of the wound, I think Lamprey more. Although I thought they were round mouthed critters, so thanks Slab for visual!

Best,

Must have stopped in for lap dance in P-town before heading up stream
Just saying.Good luck,

SZ

Siamese twin.... reabsorbed.

Just ask Twitch.

Got a similar pic of an OR fall chinook w/ the same anomaly.

I agree with most - it is an old lamprey scar.

Lampreys feed by attaching themselves to the fish and use those teeth and rasping tongue to open a wound and hold on to the side of the fish so they can feed off the various body fluids. Since it is essentially a surface injury would not expect to see scar tissue very deep into the meat.

The parasitic stage of Pacific and River lamprey is in the salt and they stop feeding once they reach freshwater (returning to spawn). Thus the healed condition of the wound. The oval nature of the scar could be due to growth of the fish after the lamprey was shed or a slight repositioning of the lamprey during its feeding efforts.

Due to a region wide population crash of lampreys such wounds are much rarer than a number of decades ago.

curt

Definitely NOT a lamprey scar.... those leave a unique impression because of the teeth pattern... looks like a cartoon face of a smiling China-man.

Cigarette burn

+1

See it quite often. I'll try to hunt up some of my pics.

Alien probe that missed "the spot"

Now I'm intrigued! Please put up your pics.

Well, I did a search for lamprey scars.....found a half dozen or so pictures, but none on our local salmon.....but the scars look very much like your fish. I want to see why Doc thinks it isn't.

Ok, here is a really easy to see example of an absorbed twin. Sometimes you will only see a slight difference in scales or coloration, this one clearly shows the dorsal patterns and color of the absorbed twin, and also has a couple additional fins (even another adipose). Note the tri-lobe tail, adipose next to the anal fin, and dorsal coloration on the ventral side of the dominate survivor smolt.





another

Me jaw just hit the ground. Never seen anything like that.
Very cool and interesting.

So is your opinion that the original posted pic is NOT a lamprey scar?

You see all kinds of resborbed twins from two head fish to the sort that twitch post (great photos btw). However keep in mind that Eugene said that the fillet of the fish near the "spot" in question was "normal".

Typically would expect the resborbed twin to more than a skin deep phenomenon.

I like Slab Happy have seen photos completely healed scars (months to years post injury) from lamprey "bites" that look very similar to that photo that started this discussion.

Curt

Teenage girl with braces.




Need I say more?

Turn your pic upside down and you will see the smiling China-man.... every lamprey leaves the same mark.

The original pic shows a macule of spotted dorsal skin located in a field of ventral skin and scales. That was the dead give-away. Even looks like there could be a vestige of adipose fin in that macule. Notice the small thickened tan-brown area.

Smiling China-man....

Fascinating. I was just recently talking about (pondering) why I continue to spend bits and pieces of my limited free time looking at this site and whether it is "worth it" whatever that means. Learning stuff, even if it is weird sh!t like this, is a big part of the draw. Super cool if not a bit creepy. Thanks for sharing guys.

"Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please." -Walter Sobchak

Doc! I see it!
No wonder you're the Keen Eye Doc!

I believe!

I abhor the PC descriptor "Asian".

WHY?

Because it's so dam NON-descript. I mean what's the point?

"Asian" technically encompasses the Middle East... That'd be yer Arabs and towel head brown-skinned Asians. Funny we call it the Middle East when it's really SW Asia.

It also includes white folks east of the Ural Range, yer pasty blue eyed Rusky Asians to the north.

Then there's all them southcentral "stani" Asians.... the Afghan's, the Paki's, the Kazak's, Uzbek's, and all the others hardly anyone remembers.

And there's yer Hindu Asians that make up a 1/4 of the world population.

Then there's all the slanty eyed Ornamental Asiansto the southeast.... which is what folks really mean to say when they say "Asian". WTF is wrong with just saying Oriental.... dammit it's what we are. But no, unlike Achewter, we have to dance around it with PC BS. Even Ornamental is considered too broad a label by the folks that actually live there.

I mean there's yer northern yellow white Ornamentals... Mongols, Chinks (Coley didn't like China-man), Japs, and Koreans.

Then there's yer southern brown skinned Ornamentals like me... Viet, Thai,Cambodian, Laotian, Filipino, and to some extent Indonesians.... that look more and more like aboriginal Australians as you move further down the island chain toward the land down under.

How can a label that technically describes such a HUGE diversity of people groups be applied to just a small minority ???

Utterly pointless.

OK sorry for the rant.... back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Not to continue to beat a dead horse but the tooth arrangement of each lamprey species is different.

The two species that a local steelhead might encounter are either the Pacific or river lamprey. Neither of which have a tooth arrangement that looks lile the one pictured (sea lamprey??).

Curt

Pretty interesting stuff Twitch and doc!

Thanks for the info. When I thaw that fillet out I'll dissect that spot and dig a little deeper into the tissue.

The fact that Doc just responded seriously to a Big Lebowski quote is farking hillarious to me.

Fish on...

Todd

+1 funny chit

One more thing Twitch,

Is this twin absorption normal in native steelhead or is it a hatchery phenomenon?

Also, what causes it... two embryos get too close and join up or blastomere identity problems (like human identical twins)? I'm guessing the two fish are identical genetically, but we could do some genotyping to find out if no one has looked before.

Best,

Wonder which one of these conjoined 'hos will win the reabsorption game?

My guess is that neither of them will win, unless you mean "win" by being lunch almost immediately to the first predator that swims by, in which case they'll both win simultaneously!

Fish on...

Todd

Doc you better make a mold out of that

Double stacked alevin

Sure to catch fish.

First thread in awhile worth reading thanks. So would that be two punches on my card or do I have to share it with the nets.

Nice revival, doc.

Very cool!

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Great. Does this mean you can't take it out of the water now?

I guess we'll find out soon enough....

+1

Really cool thread, and some great twin imagery. Thanks you guys.

I'm with Smalma on this one though. You won't have external evidence of tooth marks on a healed old scar which grew scales over the top of it. The rescaled surface is going to hide your Chinaman. The pattern depicted in the later image is on a smooth non-scaled surface, so it really won't have the same healed appearance. Also absence of deeper abnormality seems to kill the twin theory.

I vote lamprey mark. Either way, cool case.

fb

Welcome to the future of affected Hanford radiation leaching or possibly Fukogima. I would suspect we may see some 100 lbers show up soon in PS?

This is a healed lamprey wound. I've seen hundreds in various states of healing from fresh to completely healed and "re-scaled" or "re-skinned", much like the OP's pic.

No way you can see this upside down (fresh) pattern once the re-scaling has started. Notice that the pic of the pattern is on a scaleless segment of the fish, near the operculum - probably the only reason it remained visible.

BTW, this is what a pacific lamprey mouth looks like:

http://oregonstate.edu/terra/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Terra-Cover-Final2-TB.jpg

While I too originally believed it to be a lamprey scar, I now must agree with Doc.
A scar would not develop the spot configuration, especially in the lower lateral region that is not spotted to begin with.
(Unless it were to visit a talented medical professional in the cosmetic specialty, in which case it might be an option).

I don't know what to believe anymore!

Most of you guys know what a "selfie" is I guess? Here is a "freshie" we got this weekend.

Different river than the steelie and a nook. Note the oval shape.

Hi JustBecause,

Can you send me a link to a bunch of pics of these wounds?

Be great to have a reference to compare with.

Thanks if you can!

That is obviously a .22 cal wound and the perp was a 49ers fan. Haven't you ever watched CSI?

Apparently human conjoined twins are always genetically identical.

"In short, conjoined twins occur when a fertilized egg procrastinates a division. If an egg splits in the first twelve days after conception, identical separate twins are created. If it waits until the thirteenth day or later, the embryos do not divide completely. This leaves the twins conjoined. They can be connected by a ligament, as were the original Siamese twins, Change and Eng Bunker, or attached even closer – at the head, chest, rear end, or lower body.
It is estimated that only one in 200,000 live births will result in conjoined twins. Approximately seventy percent of conjoined twins are female, though it is not known why. Conjoined twins are always the same sex, never mixed."



Can't wait to see the DNA results on CM's king to see how it works in the fish world.

Where I worked before, the Bonneville Dam fish trap, I did not take pics of the fish. I wish I would have, because over the years I handled some dandy springers and steelhead - the size you wouldn't think were around much anymore. While we did note all of the different scars and wounds, we did not photo-catalog them.

This is the closest thing I could find on the web, in a short time. Pics 9 and 10 in this gallery are interesting. Not a pacific salmon but interesting the same.

http://theriverscourse.blogspot.com/2012/03/landlocked-love-for-deep-green-beauty.html

I should have phrased my post a bit less definitively. This may very well be a remnant, vestigial twin that has been reabsorbed in a location and in a shape that is common to a lamprey scar, but it's "exceedingly unlikely". The spots are interesting but not conclusive, in my mind - skin does all sorts of weird things when it reforms, particularly if the wound is deep, hair where the re wasn't before, etc.

I'm sticking with the lamprey scar, you guys can have the "Ripley's" conclusion...

:-)

Ya but, Ornamental invasion just doesn't sound as cool!

Probably Doc will be the only one to figure this out.

fp

I think I may have caught my first ALL WILD version of the "absorbed twin syndrome".

Check out this king from last summer...



Look carefully at the patch of NON-matching skin behind the collar on the fish's left "shoulder" (I'm referring specifically to the spotting pattern)



Now check out the normal vermiculated chinook spotting pattern on the other side....

Definitely a possibility, Doc.

Kenai fish?

Indeed....

Speaking of Kenai....

http://www.ifish.net/board/showpost.php?p=13831729&postcount=34

Just saw that on PP. Looks like a good move to preserve the resource.