Arthropod Class Insecta (Insects)

These big caddisflies were tempting trout as they wriggled out of their shucks, while others skated across the water at a medium pace, probably egg-laying.

I captured this specimen in the same color as this photograph, during its egg-laying flight. The emergers are much lighter.

I'm glad I finally got one of these Belostoma water bugs under my good camera. I had been hoping to get one in my kick-net samples for a while with no luck, but I ended up finding this one drifting midstream just below the surface while I fished. I have frequently seen water scorpions do that, too, and I'm beginning to suspect that is a common situation travel for these large Hemiptera bugs, and perhaps the way trout are used to seeing them.

I don't know for sure that this is Drunella tuberculata, but that's my best guess for now.

It certainly has a different look and much more robust body shape from Drunella lata duns I photographed a couple weeks earlier, so I doubt it's that species. Using distribution records to eliminate other choices narrows this down to Drunella tuberculata or Drunella walkeri.

Markings described for the abdominal sternites of the male spinner of Drunella tuberculata are suspiciously similar to those on this female dun. Also, this dun is 9.5mm long (my ruler pic isn't very good, but I'm basing this on measuring the real thing). The size range given in the old Allen & Edmunds keys for walkeri females is 7-8mm, while tuberculata is 9-11mm. For these reasons I'm sticking it in tuberculata for now.

This is the only Drunella mayfly I saw all day. I scooped it off the water as it emerged at around 7pm from a big Catskill tailwater.

This is the most widespread species of Ephemerella, and also the most abundant in some places, but nobody I've talked to seemed to know what its duns looked like, and there were no pictures of its duns online or in any angling books. That mystery is solved with this male dun, which hatched from a definitively identified nymph.

I got several really nice pictures of this spinner. I also collected a female on the same trip.