Kokanee salmon lake acidity. As a result, the kokanee was believed to have gone extinct in the 1940s. In 2011 a few fish were found in an isolated lake on Mount Fuji. The Japanese kokanee varies from its sea-going sockeye relative in a few ways. The black kokanee breeds in March at a depth of 30–40 feet, while sockeye salmon breed in the fall and have a different number of gill rakers than the kokanee. In addition, the black kokanee is much darker in color than the sockeye or any other kokanee population. The fish has been introduced to different lakes around
Kokanee salmon of landlocked sockeye has occurred more than once with different kokanee populations, showing genetic differences between populations. Most evidence points to events that land-locked the lake-type sockeye (which spawns in streams and lakes, rather than tributaries like the sea-type sockeye, but is still anadromous and spends most of its adult life out at sea), which evolved into the non-anadromous form. Genetic evidence from kokanee in the Fraser River drainage and Columbia River drainage shows that ancestors of the kokanee came from the lake-type sockeye. The data also suggests that the kokanee may have evolved back into a lake-type anadromous form