If there’s one person on lemmy that I trust for my aquatic animal info, it’s sharkfucker420

Thank you. My takeaway is that this is salmon puberty. I wonder if they, too, stare at themselves naked in the bathroom mirror and feel weird.

But why do pacific salmon go through all these changes and die after mating only once, while Atlantic salmon can do the same thing but survive to mate many years in a row?

His lovely fishy lumps

This is just a pink salmon aka a humpy. Other species of salmon get the big overbite - called a kipe and big doglike teeth and usually more red coloration.

Well, I vaguely remember watching a documentary about it. They literally start rotting while being alive. Somehow, I don’t need to be either a nutritionist, nor a doctor to assume that flavour, texture, and safe-to-consume are all gonna be a no-no.

Edit: Found a video about it:

https://piped.video/watch?v=C5AjppfOntc

Asking the big questions.

Might be exaggerated, but some get pretty crazy looking.

https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=714

Oh no, they change that much and sometimes even more. The hump is a sexual selection trait - the bigger the hump, the more likely it is that a male will get to mate. This favors genotypes that lead to a big ol' hump. While not all pink salmon get a hump that large, the Barry Whites of the humpy salmon world have a great big shoulder boulder that makes the lady fish swoon.

Here's one of those fishy freaks: https://www.landbigfish.com/articles/default.cfm?ID=352

Probably not photoshopped, more likely just different species and the one on the bottom has been butterflied and laid with the meat touching the ground so it looks much larger. Neither one has really started to change that much at the point these pictures were taken. Towards the end of the season, at least for west coast salmon, they'll often get a lot leaner and their scales turn a super vivid red. As they lose their fat reserves, the meat also becomes much more delicate.