"sandy" wrote in message
...
Thomas Littleton wrote:
Sandy,
I don't know what species you were fishing over, but I have seen browns
do
the same thing here in the east. Like you, the size of the fly used
didn't
matter, you had one shot each with a cricket or a midge.
Sadly, I have no answer, either, but am glad to see that kind of
frustration
is widespreadg!

Hi Tom:

I wrote that post in a hurry last week, just before going on
vacation. I could have written it more carefully. I should have
called that post "do they remember individual flies?"

Depends on what you mean by "individual flies", I guess. The nine inch
brown trout I hooked on a pass lake some years ago in the Pigeon River
outside Sheboygan could hardly have forgotten it.....the fly was still in
the fish's throat when I caught it 3 hours later on another copy of the
same.

Remember is a loaded word--a word that suggests thinking.

Depends on what you mean by "remember" and "thinking", I guess.

I work in a neuroscience lab

Oh?

where they (I'm a programmer there,
not a neuroscientist) study cricket responses to wind puffs. They (the
crickets) go nuts if any incoming wind puff pulses at 30hz....which is
approximately the speed of a wasp wing beat.

Which wasp would that be? The reason I ask is that I went for a long walk
this afternoon and took pictures of a number of wasps. Some of them were
roughly 3 cm in length......others (I'm no expert, but differences in
coloration and morphology strongly suggest they were different species) were
less than 4 mm. I have no way of measuring the frequency of their wingbeats
but I'd be much surprised if all the half dozen or so varieties I saw today
showed no differences in this particular metric. And common sense dictates
that there were a few other species (Austalian, South American, African, and
Eurasian varieties come readily to mind) I missed.

As to wind puffs......well, by the time a cricket feels the movement of air
disturbed by a wasps wings.....assuming the wasp is large enough and bent on
the destruction of crickets......I'd guess the cricket is what we here in
the upper Great Lakes region refer to as "toast". Sound waves, of course,
are another matter entirely. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that
there are crickets who head for cover when they hear (I can sometimes hear
crickets hundreds of yards away......I have no reason to suppose that other
crickets {for whose benefit they are, presumably, conducting their
serenades} are any less adept at picking up their signals) wingbeats at
frequencies which suggest those of critters that prey on them. After all,
we know that various moths and mantids (or, at least the males among the
latter, anyway) will hit the deck as quickly as possible when they pick up
bats' "sonar" signals......and who's to say a cricket is dumber than a moth?

Crickets also measure the
directional source of any incoming wind puff (on a 360 degree horizontal
grid) and semi-instantly jump 180 degrees away from the wind--which
is, of course, the best escape strategy.

Well, yeah......if your trying to escape wind.......but it needs to be a
pretty long jump.

But that isn't thinking. It's hard-wired response.

Says who?

I have a hunch fish respond similarly....responding to external
stimuli with hard-wired responses, rather than thinking.

And the precise definition of the diference is.......?

But those hard-wired responses do, it seems, include some sort of short
term cache memory,

Fish have Intel® inside?

where they learn not to bite a fake grasshopper more than once,

Thus suggesting the pass lake is more magical than even I have given it
credit for.

but still ready to bite a phony black caddis...or whatever else. I know
from experience too, that the same fish will bite that
hopper the next day.

Well, sometimes.

That sort term Momento-like memory doesn't last
the night. (they were high altitude cutthroats, by the way).

Becky tells me we once watched a movie with a similar
title......um......hang on a minute...........o.k., "Memento", she says (if
I remember correctly). I dunno.

Wolfgang
who, noting (if memory serves) that cockroaches are taught to navigate mazes
and that learning requires memory, is startled (to say the least) that
roaches (and planaria, for that matter) are the intellectual superiors of
trout........well, western trout anyway.