You were incorrect, see the correct answer below.

As a Pacific Chinook salmon, I depend on forage fish because…

I need cover! Without abundant forage fish around, I’m more likely to be eaten by seabirds, bigger fish, and marine mammals when I leave the river for the ocean as a youngster.
I’m a big eater. When I am a mature adult swimming in the ocean, more than half of my diet is made up of forage species.
My human friends are bending over backward for me. Electric utility customers and public agencies dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars each year to help with my recovery in the Columbia River basin alone. It seems reasonable to make sure I have something to eat in the ocean, where I spend most of my life.
All of the above.

Forage fish such as sardines, anchovies, herring, and whitebait smelt provide cover against a gantlet of hungry seabirds, harbor seals, and larger fish that would otherwise devour the bite-size juvenile salmon when they migrate from freshwater rivers to the ocean. Then, as the salmon mature, forage species become a key food source, accounting for more than half of the diet of Chinook salmon. The extra calories provided by oil-rich forage fish enable the salmon to grow larger, produce stronger eggs, and improve reproductive success. In 2012, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which directs $250 million annually to restore salmon populations harmed by dams, cited the exceptional importance of the Columbia’s estuary and plume to salmon recovery, largely due to the presence of forage fish.

Share on Twitter.

I continually cross the Pacific Ocean in a giant figure eight, chasing an “endless summer” of sunshine and fresh fish.