If you are like myself, and frequent the Farmington river regularly in the thick of the season in search of “heads” and that dry fly fix, you might be a little concerned with the lack of insect emergences and difficulty finding those surface feeding trout. The decline in our bug life has been noted across the country and yet not much seems to be coming to the forefront to determine why, how or what is the reason. We can all speculate, I have my theories, complex in nature I believe, so I will spare the hot air at the moment. What matters is something has changed, and the drop off this season is significant, so much that we need to find out just what it is that is causing this issue before it’s too late. The Farmington isn’t the only river in our state where I have seen this phenomena, the Housatonic has had a significant decline in insect life in the last decade as well, and that river was always a bug factory with it’s prime PH.
If the insect biomass is gone, there isn’t much for the fish to sustain themselves, and that goes across all age and size classes of fish. Insect life is a huge part of what makes up their diet, and a crucial piece of the food chain in a river system. You can stock all the damn fish you want, but if there isn’t a food base their to sustain them, they simply will not survive, potentially procreate and will be seasonal fish with no real ability to holdover. Never mind what it does to the wild population, same scenario only worse.
Leading conservation groups are already aware and working on it, some stream monitoring devices are in place that will hopefully give us some answers so they can attack the problem head on. Like our Striped Bass, our trout streams are going to need all of our voices to enact change, so I feel there will be some sort of legislative battle in our future to fix the problem. As always, I will do my best to keep informed on where we are at in the process and provide you all with some information on how we can hopefully fix the problem.
This isn’t a local problem only, I have had conversations with many folks across the country who are experiencing the same decline in bug mass on many of their favorite fisheries so it might very well be a continental or even global problem. We should be seeing bug soup this time of year, not a barren watershed that looks like an insect free sterile ditch in the dead of winter. Whatever the problem is, it clearly has negatively impacted specific hatches while others seem moderately impacted or not at all.
What can you do you might ask? You can get involved with your local organizations like the: