Salmon

If you're a Salmon

You left early and went far, in a crowd of others doing the same, and you will come back to the precise spot you started from, having learned the whole ocean in between. You are energetic, social, not very reflective and extremely determined. When there is a waterfall between you and the goal you don't look for a way around.

An Atlantic salmon finds its way back from the open ocean to the exact stream where it hatched, largely by remembering the smell of the water.

The Salmon as a spirit animal

You are driven by something you can't fully explain and don't need to; you know where you are going and you go, with everyone else who is going there. You are good company on the journey and poor company for anyone who wants to stop. The flaw is that homing is not the same as home; you arrive, you start the next thing, and you are exhausted. A salmon's body changes shape for the final stretch. Yours just looks tired.

Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.

How to get along with a Salmon

When it goes wrong: A salmon under pressure pushes harder upstream until it drops; redirect the current rather than block it, and make sure there's a pool to rest in.

The Salmon in a relationship

You love in seasons and with your whole body, which in your case has reshaped itself for the occasion. You will cross an ocean to get back to the one place and then put everything into it at once. Tenderness afterward is not really your strength; you are mostly spent.

Best matchPigeonBoth navigate home from absurd distances using smell and the Earth's magnetic field, and neither can explain how.

Handle with careBrown BearBrown bears stand at the top of the waterfall with their mouths open. This needs no further explanation.

Field notes

Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works

Sociability

8

Boldness

6

Energy

8

Curiosity

2

Devotion

2

Roaming

10

• The species name salar means leaper; a salmon can clear a waterfall several times its own length.
• Young salmon spend one to several years in the river before turning silver and heading to sea in groups.
• Unlike Pacific salmon, some Atlantic salmon survive spawning, return to sea and come back to breed again.

Salmon in literature

• Loki as a salmon — Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson (1220)
• The Salmon of Knowledge — The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn, traditional (Irish) (1200)
• The salmon — The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley (1863)

Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.

Closest personalities

The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Salmon's. If you got Salmon, one of these was probably your runner-up.

• 

  Ostrich87% alike

• 

  Kangaroo84% alike

• 

  Camel83% alike

Other ocean

SharkOctopusJellyfishSeahorsePufferfish

Among the 60

Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Hugh M. Smith (1894). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits