JasonN

I've gotta go with the Royal Wulff too. It just outproduces everything else.

Short answer: all mayflies do have tails, either 2 or 3. Many of them can lose their tails incidentally, just because they're very fragile. That may be what you saw. Or perhaps you mistook a very small stonefly for a mayfly.

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My camera setup is detailed at the bottom of this page. I used the MP-E 65mm 1-5X Macro lens for these shots... better than a bellows or extension tubes.

Soon I'll be free to continue working on the new version of my site, finally! Classes are over and I've got one week left until I'm done with finals and projects and everything. (Incidentally, one really interesting final project is a mathematical model of trout selectivity for my theoretical ecology class.) But I did find time to get a few adult insects to photograph with my new camera. These are just a small sample of the "keeper" pictures from about 7 insects I photographed... the rest will appear in my site's next major update. Male Epeorus mayfly dun (Gordon Quill): Closeup underneath a caddisfly's head: Stonefly: Enjoy!

They just swim around and hang out on vegetation, I think. They can also come out of the water and fly around, just like boatmen and water scorpions.

Yeah, I think these are a really under-explored, important food for really big trout at certain times of year. A couple years ago before I got into fly fishing or C&R (don't worry, I've converted!), I kept a couple of big browns who had stomachs packed with dozens of these things and nothing else. They've got a hard profile to imitate properly in the water but I think doing it right will have very big payoffs at times. I've got pictures of one of the naturals here. Here's my favorite:

Wow, some of you guys have really impressive lists. I've met Salmo trutta... the most important one of all!

Ditto what Taxon said. It's interesting you should mention water boatmen. I had never read about them flying before, so last year around this time I was really surprised when some of the first insects I saw in the air all season turned out to be boatmen when I caught them. It's neat to watch them land on the water and dive back down. Also, I'd caution against trying to "identify" anything to its common name. There are lots of scientific species for most common names and lots of common names for most species. They really are a joke for the most part, inaccurate and subjective, so you shouldn't sweat it. Some people call just about anything small a BWO, for example. For basic fly selection, knowing the common names doesn't matter much -- just catch one of the critters and find something in your box that kinda looks like it. There's much to be gained from actually identifying them, but there's no substitute for learning the scientific names, because knowing how to tell the actual taxa apart is how you learn to associate the appearance of the insect with its behavior, which is what's really important. The names are just labels.

It's really fun seeing the imitations you guys come up with to match that picture. Here's the link to a few pictures of that specimen at different angles: http://www.troutnut.com/naturals/caddisfli...addisflies_24_1 I'm unfortunately too busy with school to join in on the challenge right now, but here's a fly I tied at the time based on that picture, to imitate that hatch. The design proved itself very quickly with several nice browns: (Full-sized version here.) In other news, I can't wait to get some caddis pupa pics with my new camera this summer! I almost cringe when I look at the current pics on my site after playing around with the new camera. My last final is a month away... and then I can finally go back to 24/7 troutnuttery!

Glad you guys enjoy them! I do plan on writing print books eventually, maybe starting in about a year. I have certain goals I want to accomplish with the site before I start on books, but the book ideas are cooking in my mind's kitchen.

This summer I'm completely redoing Troutnut.com from the ground up, drastically improving pretty much everything about it. One of the coolest improvements is that I'm getting equipment to make my photos much nicer. The new camera stuff just came in this week, and even though I don't quite have the accessories straightened out yet and don't really know how to operate the professional camera to its full potential, the early results are really nice! I'll be too busy this semester to do much more until after finals, but this summer will be a dream. Anyway, you can read about the updates and see the new nymph and larvae pictures here. Here are a few of my favorites, very very shrunk to fit the forum: The down side to getting all this new equipment for my site is that I won't be able to afford any more fly rods for years! I still only have 2. But I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

Yeah it probably is Psilotreta labida, the Dark Blue Sedge. You're getting into tricky territory with caddisflies, though, because there are so insanely many species. That would be the most common one for the description you gave, I think... I snooze, I lose! Well, not really. I've just been verrrry busy. :-/

Thanks for the props on the site. It's gonna get WAY better this summer--I've spent my whole winter break programming the code base for a really powerful new back end. I can't wait to get it up and show it off but it's a several-month project. I'm gonna be able to spend the whole summer fishing and adding critters to the site too so that'll be fun. The molting is an interesting idea, but very few freshly molted nymphs are close to pure white as far as I've seen. I've had a lot of mayflies and stoneflies molt while I was playing around with them after collecting and they're often a pale tan or ginger but it's still much closer to brown than to white. They're more like the shade of a hare's ear I think. I don't think hellgrammites (and other soft-bodied larvae) molt actually... the pale ones you found might actually not have been hellgrammites but alderfly larvae, which look like hellgrammites but they don't get quite as big and they're more pale. I've got some of them on my site too. Molting is for stuff that lives in rigid exoskeletons. As for why the prince outfished an Isonychia nymph, I would imagine that the fish weren't really keyed on the Isos. At least I've never seen an Isonychia hatch so thick that it caused the fish to be selective to them--it seems like it gets them alert and anxious to take Isos but they'd go pretty hungry if they only waited for those to come by. Iso time brings a lot of other mayflies too... my guess is that the Prince simply grabbed their attention much better and looked food-like enough that they were willing to try it. One thing Gary Lafontaine wrote about attractor patterns in general is that a really good one should work better than a real insect most times. It makes a lot of sense that that would be possible, and it explains why patterns like the prince often outfish imitative patterns--they would probably also outfish a live nymph swimming around on a bare hook if you could manage to get one out there. At least in those situations where attractiveness is more important than imitation. This is an interesting discussion.

I've heard of the stonefly and boatman ideas too. I don't think it really looks like either of them. Real stonefly antennae and tails do not look anything like biots, except on the very largest stoneflies, which are about ten times the size of a prince nymph. And they're not white and laid over the back like that. There's a kind of conventional wisdom floating around that biots = stonefly. That's more of an angler myth than anything I think. Boatmen and backswimmers may be the closest match, although a beadhead prince doesn't imitate their form really at all. It's about the right size for a really big one, though, and the wet herl and white are roughly the right colors in roughly the right amounts, if in the wrong configuration. A dead drifted nymph doesn't really move like one of them at all, though. I really doubt they're actually taken as these. Here's my take on the white: I bet the reason it appeals to the fish is that it's the color of the underbelly of various chubs and minnows. When one of them panics and moves, it flashes its underbelly. When one of them is floating around half-dead, its belly is often showing. Those are probably the trout's main experiences with the color white in a food form, and it would explain why it's such a strong trigger. So again, I think the prince is very rarely if ever mistaken for a particular food form the trout are familiar with. Instead, it has one or two characteristics in common with a lot of familiar food forms, and the combination attracts trout. Have you ever walked into a restaurant and seen somebody eating something that looks delicious, but you have absolutely no idea what it is? You've never seen it before; but your mouth waters just looking at it. I think that experience is the closest thing we can picture to what a trout's "thinking" when it takes a Prince.

Honestly I don't think it's imitative at all. I don't buy the stuff about an Isonychia imitation, even though that's the standard wisdom about the Prince. I really doubt trout ever take it for that... it's just too far. The white stripe on their backs is often absent, usually faint, and always very thin... nothing like white goose biots. The body color of mature Iso nymphs is pretty well matched by wet peacock herl and I think the structure of it is suggestive of tufty Iso gills, but the shape, proportions, and above all movement are so extremely out of whack that I don't think they ever take a prince to be an Isonychia. Instead, I simply think it's a pattern that has a lot of bold features that draw attention to itself but don't quite cause suspicion, so it works good as an attractor, just like a Royal Wulff or something. I don't think the trout mistake such attractors for any particular food item all that often. We know that they have to sample unknown things to learn about new foods. And we know that they learn to do that by figuring out what kind of characteristics food has. If they see some new thing that looks "food-y" they may well try it. So it's ideal for us to try to create flies that will draw a trout's attention from a considerable distance with bold triggering characteristics like a bead head or a white wing, and then seem "food-y" enough closeup that the trout decides to try them. I think that's the case with the Prince, and that guys who try to make it out to be an imitation, even a very impressionistic one, are really grasping for straws.

Hatches II is definitely one of the best. Also, "Mayflies, the Angler, and the Trout" by Fred Arbona. Also, "Mayflies: An Angler's Study of Trout Water Ephemeroptera" by Knopp & Cormier. Those are by far the three most useful books for practical identification right now... it's be hard to put them in order actually. I hope to make my site a better identification resource than all of them this summer. I'm going to create a species key with all the raw information I can find from thousands of pages of scientific papers I'm photocopying. It's a huge project I'm doing this summer. I want to make it as easy as possible to identify stuff correctly, cause even with the three good books above it's really hard in most cases and very often impossible to get it correct.

I don't actually preserve many of my insects. The reason I got into photographing them was that I wanted to keep track of their natural colors and preservation seemed to destroy that. I do preserve a few, and I just use 70% isopropyl alcohol (like 12 cents a bottle at Wal-Mart) but that's the cheapest, easiest way to do it and doesn't preserve their color well at all. I have, however, read about one process that supposedly preserves color perfectly. It's kind of complicated, but apparently it works. It was developed by Al Caucci and Bob Nastasi and described on page 294 of their book Hatches II. (I'm afraid I'm 1200 miles from my copy of the book at the moment, but I've referred people to it before so I have the page number on hand.) The book's a very worthwhile purchase for many reasons, or perhaps you can find it through a library.

Well despite all the studying I've done on it, I'm still pretty new to fly fishing so I don't have a lot of repeat experiences with hatches. Actually, I don't have any. But my favorite hatch so far is definitely Isonychia bicolor. When I fished it this year, it lasted for a few weeks and was rarely very intense, but since it was a long-lasting sporadic emergence of big meaty flies it got the big trout looking up all the time. I was able to get them on those imitations even when there was no hatch ongoing at that particular minute. And when occasionally they emerged thick enough to constitute a "real" hatch... MAN the trout went wild for them. I had one night like that and landed two 16s, a 17, two 18s, and a 21, all wild browns. It was my best day of trout fishing ever. By the way, these were the midwestern Isonychia bicolor strain, the ones that used to be known as Isonychia sadleri and that emerge on the top of the water in late June or so. I didn't have as much luck in September with the Catskill Isonychia bicolor hatch, which largely emerges by crawling out onto the rocks and didn't seem to cause as much excitement with the fish.

Okay, short answer: It's a Golden Drake (Potamanthus). Long answer: I think it's a female Potamanthus (Golden Drake) dun. The most well-known species is Potamanthus distinctus, and from the markings on the side it sounds like that's what you've got, though it's hard to be certain of the species without more pictures. Mayflies in the Ephemera genus (Green, Brown, and Yellow Drakes) have spots on their wings. This one has unspotted wings with strong venation characteristic of Hexagenia and Potamanthus. I'm saying Potamanthus instead of Hexagenia for three reasons: The front legs are light with dark bands. Most Hex duns have dark front legs. The wings are quite yellow. Most Hex duns have gray wings. You found it out east. Hexagenia has a pretty narrow range in the Midwest, but Potamanthus is more likely to be found where you were. Do you recall how many tails it had? If it had 3 tails, that's a definite giveaway that it's not Hexagenia. They only have 2. Potamanthus has 3.

Electrons. But for the handful that I preserve physically instead of using digital photography, I use isopropyl alcohol. It's not the best, but it works well enough for non-professional purposes and you can get it really cheap at your nearest whatever-mart.

Male Tricorythodes. Species is probably stygiatus or minutus, maybe allectus but that one's a lot less common. If you can actually tell the species of Tricos apart at a glance you're a better man than I. I fear I've been beaten to the points! Noooooooo.....

Muskrat fur (dyed to any number of colors, remember), and Whiting Platinum Chickens. (Is that a cheat? I get both the saddle and the cape in one item by listing the chicken as the material!)

My friend Roger Rohrbeck who helped me with valuable feedback and testing on Troutnut.com has created a really nice new site of his own with a very impressive, organized collection of information: Fly Fishing Entomology.

Hm, my best guess so far would be March Brown, Stenonema vicarium.