What does coho salmon eat?
What is established about how coho salmon feeds, kept separate from what anglers infer from it.
What is known about how it feeds
Coho spend less time at sea than chinook and grow faster while there, and the diet reflects a fish making the most of a short marine phase.
The verified relationship is Pacific sand lance, the principal forage fish of the north-eastern Pacific nearshore, taken heavily during the marine growth phase. Herring, euphausiids and squid make up much of the rest, and coho feed closer inshore and shallower than chinook on average, which is a genuine difference in where the same kinds of prey are taken.
The freshwater juvenile phase is longer than chinook's and is spent in small streams, where young coho are territorial drift feeders on insect larvae — a completely different ecology occupying the first year or two of life, and one these relationships do not describe.
Aggression is the behavioural characteristic anglers and biologists both note. Coho are notably aggressive feeders in the marine phase and retain more of that on entering fresh water than most Pacific salmon do, which is a reported tendency rather than a measured one.
Like other Pacific salmon they are semelparous, ceasing to feed on entering fresh water and dying after spawning.
The food
What the catalogue holds a verified dietary relationship for. Each entry carries its own evidence, and each is recorded at the granularity the source actually used: a named species where the source named one, a taxon or food category where it said “polychaetes”, “crustaceans” or “detritus” and meant it. That is why this list is shorter than the animal’s real diet rather than longer.
- Pacific sand lance — Ammodytes personatus
Sand lance are heavily taken by coho in coastal waters, particularly during the marine growth phase before return.
Food the catalogue does not hold records for
These are real components of the diet, listed as plain text because FishingHQ has no page for them yet. Inventing pages to make the list look fuller would be the fabrication the whole approach exists to prevent.
- Pacific herring
- euphausiids and amphipods
- squid
- juvenile rockfish
- insect larvae, in the freshwater juvenile phase
What anglers do with this
Everything below is interpretation, not finding. It is what experienced anglers conclude from the biology above, and the reasoning is usually sound and almost never tested. It is separated from the biology deliberately.
The nearshore, shallower marine feeding is the reasoning behind targeting coho closer to shore and higher in the water column than chinook, which anglers treat as a reliable distinction between the two.
The reported aggression converts into an expectation that coho will respond to faster and more provocative presentations, which is practitioner consensus rather than a demonstrated difference.
As with all Pacific salmon, retention rules distinguish between hatchery and wild fish in many fisheries and change within a season. What applies is a question for the relevant authority.
What this does not establish
One relationship for a marine diet that includes several other principal items. It describes the ocean phase only, not the freshwater juvenile diet or the non-feeding spawning phase. Composition varies by region and year, and nothing here establishes proportions.
Where this connects
These are the baits, lures, methods and explainers FishingHQ already joins to this fish — which is why the list is sometimes short. They are not chosen for this page, and a link here means an evidenced relationship exists, not that it follows from the diet.
This page covers feeding. The Coho salmon record covers identification, lifecycle, seasonal behaviour, handling and the sources behind all of it.
Reviewed 2026-08-12.