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3. Ephemerella dorothea infrequens ?, Page 2

Mark,

Do you think you have both present? I'd go more by emergence and size if I were you as I know you are pretty intimate with the fauna in that river. If these are larger and emerge (mature) much earlier, and for a brief period - you are probably right. My point was not to doubt your diagnosis but rather to mention the frustration/futility of using taxonomic characters to verify it at the present time. ;)

Paul,

They emerge in typical ephemerellid fashion. The big difference is when they are hatching. The duns rarely spend as much time on the water as their earlier hatching counterparts, I assume due to the drier, warmer air. The fish are also quite aware of our attempts to fool them with dry flies by then. "Lightly fished" is a relative term. Hoardes of anglers are not necessary to educate them at least somewhat. Many times I have fished a pool and hammered the fish only to return and find them more difficult, even though the same conditions prevailed.

Kurt,

I don't think both are present as there only seems to be one cohort of the nymphs, they emerge early and only for a short period of time.

I don't really care if you doubt my conclusions.:) That's part of what makes this forum good. I tend to come off terse sometimes and forget to put in a smiley face.

I always thought the word "cohort" was a group of people or a companion. I wasn't aware of using it to describe a group of nymphs. I actually learned something today.

No way, really?

Kurt, yeah, both "sulphers" as we called them (invaria and dorothea) do tend to come off at the heads of pools -esp invaria, they even from turbulent runs. You are likely right that the speed at which they come off may explain a lot of it. I also remember "rises" could be explosive then -probably the trout chasing nymphs up.

But... as to fishing pressure, these streams were hit much harder (and not all that hard) during the subvaria emergences and I don't remember the fish being difficult with subvaria. However, subvaria didn't come off in the numbers or duration (month or more) that dorothea did. Warmer water and associated rapid emergence as well as emergence density probably accounts for the majority of the difficulty on the waters I fished most regularly.

Matt,



Yeah, really.:)

Just bustin' you! I think you knew that. When I was younger I used to think about saying some things but always held my tongue or in this case my keystrokes. Maybe it has something to do with aging but now I am more apt to just let it out as long as I know it won't hurt someone's feelings.