How do salmon find their way back home? Why do they go back to the same river? How many salmon survive the journey? The Chinook salmon is the largest salmon on earth, and they've got a fascinating life cycle. In this episode, we learn everything about them.
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| 0:00.0 | Our lives are based on cycles. We wake up, eat, do stuff, go back to sleep, and then start again, typically in a way that is choreographed with the rotation of the rock we're all living on. Your day-to-day routine is literally a personal cycle based on a planetary cycle. |
| 0:23.3 | Your years are the same way. |
| 0:29.2 | Most of us have annual traditions, even shifts in lifestyle patterns based on the rotation of the Earth around the sun. |
| 0:31.0 | That is a cycle based on a cycle. |
| 0:34.3 | Heck, life on Earth is a cycle. |
| 0:37.0 | You are born, you grow up, you pass the genetic baton, if |
| 0:40.4 | possible, and you die. The person you pass the baton to does the same thing, and of course, |
| 0:47.1 | the person before you did the same thing, and the person before them, and before them, |
| 0:52.4 | all the way back until a time when you could hardly |
| 0:54.9 | call the baton passer a person, certainly not a human. |
| 1:01.2 | You may feel like the center of some fantastic story, and to you, you are, but from a distance, |
| 1:09.2 | you're just a link on a biological chain that stretches back billions of years. |
| 1:16.8 | Generation after generation after generation. |
| 1:21.9 | The earth just keeps on spinning. |
| 1:25.5 | Today's animal has a life that is, in some significant ways, more cyclical than ours. |
| 1:33.4 | It is meta-cyclical, in a way that is guaranteed to satisfy the aesthetic part of your brain, |
| 1:41.3 | whilst bewildering and exciting the scientific part. |
| 1:48.3 | Today's animal lives a life that is one, epic, unfathomable circle. |
| 1:56.5 | Today's animal is the Chinook salmon. |
| 1:59.9 | Oncorinkus Ch-e-cha. |
| 2:02.4 | I'm Mackin. This is species. |
| 2:09.7 | Welcome to the show. Happy Thanksgiving. |
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