bug tank

paraleptropy wrote in message

Overall, I consider myself very successfull with my setup. If you
have any other questions, please feel free to ask here or on the site
mentioned above. I'll try to answer your questions as best I can.


Thank you

I picked up a small plastic tank today and will collect some rocks, weeds
and bugs soon, from a local trout river.

My problem is that I fish 1500 miles from were I live, and live out of a
travel trailer 4 or 5 months a year to do so. It's a life style I love,
but my only electricity is usually a generator I run as little as possible.
I have serious doubts about keeping the tank cool enough to keep the bugs
feeling perky.

Pictures are very available ( yours are very nice, btw ) of the underwater
and adult forms of the insects that interest me. It's the brief periods of
transition that I want to see for myself. I doubt that I will observe
anything that hasn't already been described in FF literature but I have a
do-it-yourself nature, and, dangit, I wanta see it myself G.

I've seen enough mayflies emerge to feel comfortable that I have a decent
feel for the process and how the dun/shuck looks at various points in time,
and from various angles. Same with many other bugs ... , for example,
I've spent hours watching and measuring damsel nymphs, even measuring how
far they move in x number of seconds and working on retrieves to match it
( this really paid off .... I guess, ...with more accurate patterns and
retrieves, I got a lot better at catching fish during my yearly trips to
fish the Davis Lake damsel hatch, ... then I got bored from too much
success and stopped fishing it ;-). I've also laid on my belly and
watched a lot of midges shed their shucks ... it's really the caddis that
leave me feeling at the mercy of writers, instead of my own observational
errors G

But I've had very little luck seeing caddis in anything but the full adult
or the full larva stages out in the real world. This is partly because of
their tendency to be last light emergers, and live in rough and tumble
waters that make "seeing into" difficult, compared to softer flows.
Anyway, I can collect caddis larva here locally but watching the pupa
emerge is what I'm interested in seeing. I've collected lots of caddis
adults and larva, don't have that big an interest in those stages at this
point, and I'm not sure how well a small tank in a camper is going to work
out for raising pupa to emergence.