Canned salmon with a wormy surprise. 

I love smoked salmon. I have since I was a kid. Let me backtrack just a little bit, my dad loved salmon fishing. Every year he would make at least one, sometimes two, trips over to the Olympic Peninsula to go salmon fishing and then he would come back with a few fish and sometimes boxes of smoked salmon. 

At the locations where he would fish, what he could do is catch his limit, clean the fish, and then he could take the salmon to a canning company. They would weigh the salmon that he brought them, and then they would give him the equivalent in smoked salmon in cans minus a fee. (We had a lot of smoked salmon in the pantry.) 

I can remember thinking I was really sneaky, going down to the pantry, grabbing a can, popping it open and eating that smoked salmon. (It was so good.) 

All of that brings me to an article I read. In Science alert. According to sciencealert.com,
“So when Wood got a call from Seattle's Seafood Products Association, asking if she'd be interested in taking boxes of dusty old, expired cans of salmon – dating back to the 1970s – off their hands, her answer was, unequivocally, yes. The cans had been set aside for decades as part of the association's quality control process, but in the hands of the ecologists, they became an archive of excellently preserved specimens; not of salmon, but of worms.” 

Parasite ecologists at the University of Washington wanted a way to look back in time to track the effects of parasites on Pacific Northwest marine mammals. 

The old cans of salmon from the 1970s provided them with information that they were looking for. The parasite they're looking for is an anisakid. They wind up in the food chain after being eaten by krill. Which are then eaten by larger species ultimately winding up eaten by salmon.  

After reading this article, it makes me very glad that I had no clue as to what an anisakid was or how it could be preserved in canned salmon. 

There's much more in the article than what I have talked about here but suffice it to say I have hit my limit for reading articles about worms and food. 

Mmmm, smoked anisakid. 

Expired Cans of Salmon From Decades Ago Reveal a Big Surprise : ScienceAlert 

Anisakidae - Wikipedia