Chinook Salmon

Chinook salmon are the giants of Pacific salmon, regularly exceeding 40 pounds and occasionally reaching 100 pounds - five times larger than most salmon species. This size isn't vanity; it's strategy. Larger bodies store more energy for longer migrations, carry more eggs, and transport more marine nutrients into nutrient-poor headwater streams. A single chinook carcass delivers the nitrogen equivalent of several sockeye salmon. Size amplifies the keystone nutrient function.

Chinook also demonstrate the longest migrations of any salmon, traveling over 2,000 miles up the Yukon River to spawn in Canadian headwaters. This requires not just stored energy but sophisticated navigation - sensing Earth's magnetic field, following chemical gradients, and recognizing natal stream odors after years in the ocean. The journey takes months. Fish arrive at spawning grounds having lost 60-70% of body mass, skin sloughing, immune systems collapsed, organs failing - yet still capable of digging redds and depositing eggs.

The business parallel concerns the relationship between scale and impact. Chinook teach that larger individual units can deliver disproportionate ecosystem effects. One enterprise customer may be worth hundreds of small accounts not just in revenue but in market signaling, reference value, and ecosystem development. The resources required to land a chinook-scale customer are greater, but the nutrient subsidy they provide to the broader business ecosystem scales superlinearly with their size.