Fish On, Fish Off by Sautner Stephen;

Author:Sautner, Stephen; [Sautner, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Night of the Living Hellgrammites

One of the best ways to learn the inner workings of a trout stream is to get a small minnow seine or a decent-sized aquarium net and wade into a shallow riffle. Have someone hold the net immediately down-current—just make sure it’s touching the stream bottom. Then start turning over rocks. Do this for a minute or two then lift the net from the water. If the stream is moderately healthy, you will now be staring at a seething mass of trout food.

Start picking through your haul to see exactly what’s in there. Assuming you’ve placed your net in a bona fide coldwater trout stream, it’s a safe bet that mayfly nymphs of various sizes will be crawling about. Some are mere fractions of an inch—maybe blue-winged olives or this year’s first molt of Hendricksons. Others are much larger, mottled, and flat—probably March Brown or Cahill nymphs, a sure sign that the stream runs cold and clean year-round. Maroon-colored Isonychia nymphs will flip around like miniature shrimp. Place them in a bucket with some water and they zoom about like little submarines.

Clusters of small twigs and pebbles seemingly glued together may turn out to be the homes of stick caddis—look for a hole in one end and you might see a small head staring back at you. Put them in the bucket with the Isonychias and they will eventually start lumbering along the bottom carrying their home on their backs. What might look like craggy, waterlogged beetles stuck in the net are actually dragonfly nymphs—ugly creatures that belie one of nature’s most graceful fliers.

Virtually all of these critters are harmless. Even a two-inch stonefly nymph with an abdomen striped like a hornet will merely wander over your fingers fruitlessly looking for a rock to hide under.

But if you find something much larger in the net that looks like it belongs not on a trout stream but in a science fiction movie—the one where the creature-from-another-planet crawls into your ear and eats your brain—you have caught a hellgrammite. They can be as long as your index finger with a meaty, muscular body flanked on each side with wriggling centipede legs. The head is topped with a pair of hooked pinchers that can and will draw blood. They eventually hatch into massive dobsonflies—747-sized bugs that can easily be mistaken for bats when they buzz around trout streams at dusk.

Even their name—HELL-GRAM-MITE—sounds scary, almost like some sort of medieval torture device: “Never mind the iron maiden; place the knave in the hellgrammite.”

And if regional nicknames are any indication of temperament, draw your own conclusion from hellgrammites, which, according to a favorite fishing book from the 1930s, are also called corruption bugs, crock hell devils, alligators, dragons, snake doctors, hell divers, flip devils, and water grampus. The last nickname is a bastardization of krampus, a European mythological monster known to haunt misbehaving children.

Except this is no mythological monster; these things are real. And as a group of us learned one late spring night on our annual camping trip on the Upper Delaware River, they will attack.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.