 As people grow, we go through distinct developmental stages. We change from baby to toddler to child to teenager to adult. And that's true for salmon as well. The way a salmon looks, what it eats, where it lives and how it moves, those all change throughout its life cycle. So by paying attention to those stages and learning more about the adaptations that help salmon survive along the way, we can get to know these amazing fish a little bit better. Raising salmon through the Fish Friends program gives us a close-up view of the early parts of an Atlantic salmon's life cycle. We can't provide the exact same conditions that they'd have in the wild, but we do need to know about their life cycle in order to take care of them. I always encourage folks to field a glass when they first visit our tank, and that's because water temperature is really important. Right now ours is at about 45 degrees, so this glass feels really cold. That's because in the wild adult salmon lay their eggs in freshwater streams in the fall. A female will swish her tail over the gravelly bottom to build a nest that's called a red. She then lays several thousand eggs that are fertilized by a male. These eggs overwinter, and then continue to develop as streams begin to warm back up in the spring. We get our eggs at the eyed egg stage, where you can see parts of the young salmon, especially its eye, through the eggshell. Once the eggs have been in warm enough water for a long enough time, they begin to hatch. The newly hatched salmon is now called an alvin. In the wild, alvin remain hidden in the gravel. During these early stages of their life cycle, there are lots of predators who would love to gobble up an egg or a baby salmon. And alvin are able to stay hidden because they don't need to eat. They hatch with the yolk sacs still attached to their bellies. Over time, this yolk sac gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it's fully absorbed. We call this being buttoned up, and it's a sign that the salmon is now a fry. Fry can swim freely, and we'll need to start eating. They're still quite small, so they feed on microscopic invertebrates and definitely need to still watch out for predators. This is the stage where fish friends' participants release their salmon to continue growing in the wild. As the salmon grow into par, they're able to eat bigger things like aquatic insect larvae and need to move around more defined food. They develop vertical bars and spots on the sides of their bodies that help them to camouflage. Now, because the par are still living in or near the cold stream where they hatched, they grow slowly. It'll take about two to three years for them to enter the next stage of their life cycle. But after that time, the salmon are between five and nine inches long and ready for a big change. Externally, we can notice them becoming silvery and more streamlined as they change into smolt. As they head downstream towards the ocean, their bodies are changing on the inside too to adjust to living in salt water. Once in the ocean, the salmon grow much more quickly, so in just a year, our smolt will have grown into adult salmon. Most will spend up to three years at sea before returning to spawn or lay their eggs. And unlike Pacific salmon species who die after laying eggs, Atlantic salmon may live to spawn multiple times.