Sockeye salmon are blue tinged with silver in color while living in the ocean. When they return to spawning grounds, their bodies become red and their heads turn green. Sockeye can be anywhere from in length and weigh from . Two distinguishing features are their long, serrated gill rakers that range from 30 to 40 in number, and their lack of a spot on their tail or back. Sockeye salmon range as far south as the Columbia River in the eastern Pacific (although individuals have been spotted as far south as the 10 Mile River on the Mendocino Coast of California) and
Sockeye salmon Resources Commission in an attempt to establish the species as a forage fish for other predator fishes in the lake. This stock has remained and become a favorite target for anglers. In Japan, a landlocked variety termed black kokanee, or ""kunimasu"" in Japanese, was deemed to be extinct after 1940, when a hydroelectric project made its native lake in northern Akita Prefecture more acidic. The species seems to have been saved by transferring eggs to Saiko Lake, 500 kilometers to the south, however. This fish has been treated as a subspecies of sockeye "Oncorhynchus nerka kawamurae", or even an independent