ENST: An Indomitable Salmon Returns to the Screen

The story of a salmon
seeking its home creek was
almost impossible to believe

Ten years ago this month, I recounted a story that Lad Allen, producer at Illustra Media, had told in one of his earlier films for Moody Institute of Science. The story didn’t make it into their upgraded film Living Waters, so I wrote up the story for Evolution News & Science Today (now renamed Science and Culture Today). Below is the account I wrote, but there is good news: Lad Allen and editor Jerry Harned resurrected the story last year in a new short film for The John 10:10 Project and upscaled it to 4K for modern standards. Read the story, then watch the film!

A Salmon Called Indomitable
by David Coppedge
Evolution News & Science Today, August 19, 2015

Salmon as shown in Living Waters. Click to watch and share a Short Reel about this story!

They called him Indomitable. This Coho salmon’s migratory adventure seems almost impossible to believe, but it’s not just an old fish tale — it’s true. Illustra producer Lad Allen and editor Jerry Harned documented the story back in the VHS days of 1992. When planning the new documentary Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth a couple of years ago, Lad was hoping to retell it in high-definition, but the constraints of time often call for painful decisions that leave good material on the cutting room floor. We can at least share this and other stories in words.

At the Prairie Creek Fish Hatchery on the northern California coast, workers were surprised on the morning of December 2, 1964, to find a large male Coho salmon swimming among juveniles in a concrete rearing pond. It had the distinctive mark on its fin of fish raised in this particular pond. The puzzle was how it got there. The only route was a vertical pipe that drained the pond’s overflow out into Lost Man Creek behind the hatchery, which joined Prairie Creek and then Redwood Creek before flowing into the ocean. Scientists retraced this fish’s route to figure out what it would have had to do to make it into the pond….

Click here to continue reading.

and Click here to watch this story in an updated video!

See also “Part 1” of the video, an introduction to salmon migration.