Fish wheel salmon species Chinook, Chum, Coho, Sockeye, and Pink) and other anadromous species of fish, has given fish wheels their second name as "salmon" wheels. Although salmon were prioritized by commercial fishers and Indigenous peoples (albeit for different reasons,) other fish such as steelhead trout ("Oncorhynchus mykiss"), ooligan ("Thaleichthys pacificus"), and lamprey ("Lampetra tridentata") were also considered valuable catch. While the fish wheel is best known for its presence on the Northwestern coast of North America, there is debate whether the technology arrived via Asian migrants who had come to labor in the gold fields, by Scottish and Russian migrants, or
Environmental issues with salmon 59 years of catch and escapement data of Bristol Bay sockeye to determine age and size at maturity trends attributable to the selectivity of commercial gillnet harvests. The study found that the larger females (>550 mm) of all age classes were most susceptible to harvest. The study suggests that smaller, younger fish were more likely to successfully traverse the gillnet fishery and reproduce than the larger fish. The study also found that the average length of sockeye harvested from 1946–2005 was 8 mm larger than the sockeye who escaped the gillnet fishery to spawn, reducing the fecundity of the average