Mother's Day Caddis -- and what is real

Rainbow and brown trout in the United States are genetically similar compared to the Cutthroats. Most anyway. Which isn't surprising. The Rainbows were planted continent-wide from a few small core stocks in the Pacific Northwest. And much the same for the browns, albeit from Germany and Scotland in the Brown Trout case. The Cutthroats, on the other hand, vary noticeably from river system to river system. Some are even considered sub-species¹ aren't they?

So too with the Mother's Day Caddis I think. The Caddis on the Yellowstone are far more black bodied than their more tan-colored Madison River cousins. The photo above is a Madison River Mother's Day Caddis.

Noticing subtle color differences among aquatic bugs raises an interesting question. I can start with a photograph of a lighter tan-colored Madison River Caddis and make it look like a blacker Yellowstone Caddis with a few quick clicks of the photo-processing mouse. I wouldn't likely do that intentionally. But when processing digital photos it's easy to get sucked into final image appearance goals that revolve more around bright colors and sharp contrast than natural appearance reproduction. What happens to movie stars and super models in fashion magazines is a familiar and related topic. The more I play with digital image processing the more I see how hard it is to stay grounded in reality. Or appearance thereof.

¹ Behnke in his salmon and trout handbook of 2002 recognized 14 subspecies of cutthroat trout that are each native to a separate geographic area