Here's a Pale Watery spinner, Baetis fuscatus which I collected from the Taff yesterday evening and photographed before work this morning. The collecting jar spent the night in my truck so the fly was chilled for the pictures.

These are very elegant flies to watch, they're graceful flyers and look wonderful in the last light at the end of summer.

Their weird looking eyes are describe as "turbinate", a word derived from the Latin for a spinning top, turbinatus.

The eyes are divided into upper and lower areas, the upper area is specialised for detecting rapid movements and the lower area which faces downwards and sideways sees detail.

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Musha rig um du rum da

Great macro pics mate.
A lovely wee fly

Munro

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Lovely mages and informative info on the eye function which I hadn't appreciated before.

Nice sheen on the wings. I assume a male example.

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Save the softmouth trout

I dont suppose anyone has any info on the length of these flies? There were a fair few coming off voer the weekend and they looked to be about the same size as my size 19 spinner patterns?!

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Thanks for that.
The information on the eyes came from a cracking little book in the Naturalists Handbooks series written by Janet Harker called "Mayflies".

Certainly a male, the claspers are a bit fuzzy in the pics but the shadow in the second one defines them.

DP, I'd say they were about 4mm long + a long tail. I'll put a hook in the next photos to show a comparison.

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Musha rig um du rum da

Cheer DB, would be much appreciated. Was unsure of the type of "olive" that was hatching but they were pretty tiny and appeared to be a sort of grey/tan colour so had a guess at pale wateries. Certainly weren't BWO.

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