Hi', Jas, Buzz is right, you don't need to know all the latin names; I don't, and I've been bug-hunting for over forty years. That knowledge helps under certain circumstances, but for everyday use, generalisation works pretty well.
We can't copy the bugs exactly. although some get pretty close, very close if you feel like hunching over a vice for hours on end. What the average fly dresser should aim for, in my humble opinion, is an artificial that is a very easily recognised caricature of the real thing. After all, in a stream the trout get little more than a fleeting glance of a nymph, fly, beetle or shrimp etc. In slow moving pools and still waters (lakes/ressies and ponds ) the fish have more time to examine our offerings, hence the effectiveness of some excellent buzzer and nymph patterns.
The late Richard Walker once drew a picture of a little stick man, wearing a triangular hat; he then added two slanting eyes, and without wishing to appear racist in this daft PC world of ours, I'd say all who saw the sketch said, 'A Chinaman'. Please, any cranks out there, don't give me any grief.
Dick then added an upturned mouth, which showed that his little man was happy, then he changed it to a downturned mouth -- the little stick man was now unhappy.
What I am trying to say is that you should look for the more obvious points of identification of insects:--- the most important for the angler being their season, or as the biologists put it, their flight period. Then shape, then size and last of all colour. After all, a silhouette seen against a bright sky is, to all intents and purposes, black. I have illustrated this many times to fly tying class members. I won't say colour can't have more importance, but it's not top of my list.
For the beginner, I always used to say look for geometric shapes. The vertical long triangle is the wing of an upwinged fly -- one of the ephemeroptera, apart from the caenis family, they carry them flat. The long horizontal triangle is the wing of the sedge ( or the Alder Fly, I guess someone will remark ) and the long rectangle or roughly cylindrical body shape is the mark of the stonefly fly species. You can't get much simpler than that.
Good luck with your studies, and don't be put off by numbers --- 51 species of upwinged insects; about 190 sedges (caddis); 34 stoneflies, only one Alder Fly!!!
; 400+ in the midge family; loads of beetles; fair few craneflies and dragonflies/damsels: BUT, a tiny fraction of the total will suffice for all your fly fishing needs. It's a fascinating hobby, and the greatest advantage you will probably find from studying aquatic bugs is that when there isn't an aquaric fly in sight, you will know what should be in season, no matter where you are in the UK. What is more, you will be able to copy it from memory, or from the contents of your fly boxes. And you won't need a barrowload.
Cheers, TerryC
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