I chapped a couple of (stillwater) trout yesterday, which afforded the chance to get the marrow spoon out. The first had loads of hoglouse and not much else. I didn't bother to check the second one, but had a look when gutting it at home last night. It also had some hoglouse, but also had about a dozen alder larvae in various stages of digestion. The least digested was still alive - about 9 hours after the trout was caught, and who knows how many more since it was swallowed. I picked it out and put it in a Petri dish of water and put it to one side. It was swimming about like Michael Phelps today, the only signs of its ordeal being a couple of bent gills. So, I got the macro lens out...

Usual problem with it not stopping still for even one second - quite apart from shutter speed problems (tried to avoid using flash, what with the water surface to shoot through) I couldn't keep him in the frame! I stuck the Petri dish in the freezer for as long as I dare. When I brought it out it was part ice, part water - and he was still swimming...!

Here's what I managed to get...

On a grey background...



...black background...



...and with the sun on its back...


Interesting to look at the whitish blood vessels running up the (fairly transparent) gills. He obviously has a reflex reaction built in that monitors oxygen levels and when it reads a bit low, he wafts his abdomen up and down dolphin-fashion to increase water flow across his gills.

Body length = 16 mm

Col

Lovely photos Col. I know this is the entomology section but even so, I thought I was the only angler sad enough to own a petri dish.....how wrong I was!

It's amazing isn't it how long the insects can survive after injestion. I've hatched midge off in my kitchen after gutting a rainbow which allowed interesting study of them discarding their shucks. A few minutes later the successful emergers were buzzing around my kitchen light bulb. Talk about Lazarus!!

M

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The sun pushed dark spokes of melt and sparkle
Across the fields of hoar. And the river steamed -
Flint-olive.


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Hi Matt/

Aye, I think the prize for most bullet-proof goes to them wee red water mites. I've hardly ever seen a dead one inside a trout. Even if you gut fish the next day, they are still alive and full of beans.

As for the buzzers, it's funny you mention it, but I chapped a fish at Carron last week and spooned it, and it had live buzzers on it. I posed it for a shot, and by the time I took the shot, two of the buzzers were in the act of hatching on the spoon. See the one in the top right corner...



It's a wee bit mind-blowing when you think about it... so I am a small aquatic invertebrate, swimming along minding my own business, and suddenly I am swallowed by a trout. What are my chances of survival? Must be billions to one against. But within the hour you come along, and you catch the trout and kill it and spoon it, and after spooning it, you wash the spoon in the water. And I'm back, swimming happily once more. I guess that makes you God

Those are very good photos CF- that alder nymph is the Nigel Farage of the fly world!

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Musha rig um du rum da

these are some of the best pics ive seen cap'n ,excellent

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WHEN YOU LEAVE THE RIVER, TAKE NOTHING, AND LEAVE ONLY FOOTPRINT'S!!!

THA CAN TELL A YORKSHIREMAN ,BUT THA CAN'T TELL HIM MUCH !!

He's still going a week later. I'll need to take him up to Inverleith pond tomorrow

Hello there, those are nice pics. These nymphs are standard fare on my mountain lakes. A Pheasant Tail Nymph kinda does the job but do you have any nymph patterns tied specificaly for the alder nymph and experience of using them? Kind regards, Terry

What superb photos.

Please detail the photographic technique you used.

The alder nymph is common throughout still waters and rivers throughout the country. In South Africa we had an alderfly nymph that is over an inch long and is called affectionately the "toebiter".

Needless to say it is extremely aggressive, but trout love them.

Hi Terry/ they are a bit of a rare find in stomach contents compared to stuff like buzzers, daphnia hoglouse, etc, and I've never really tried imitating them.

Col

Hi Ron/

Just a combination of making it up as I went along and trial and error

Set up was to have the nymph in a plastic Petri dish of water, so only about 8 mm deep water. That worked out well in that you can hardly tell there is any water there. He kept trying to do the goldfish thing of thinking he could swim through the side to the light beyond, so I made a collar out of card and taped that round the dish to give him an opaque background to look at. That quietened him down a fair bit, but I still had to bin at least half a dozen blurry shots for every one where he kept still for the duration of the exposure.

I sat the dish on the windowsill so I could just use diffuse natural light. I put the camera on a tripod aligned vertically above the dish, so the shots are all straight overhead plan views.

Camera is a Canon 40D and Canon EF 100 mm f2.8 macro lens.
All shots taken at f19. I used aperture priority and evaluative metering with 0 EV compensation for the grey background and -1 EV for the black background - in other words I let the background dictate the exposure rather than try to mess about with the awkward nymph on that parameter - that's the one bit where I did know what I was doing

Manual focusing and remote shutter release used. The 2 in the shade were 1.5 and 2 second exposures. The one in the sun was 1/6 sec.

Images taken in RAW mode and processed in ACR 4.3.1.

Hope that helps,

Col