Everyone loves fishing hopper flies. And by now, fly tiers have come up with almost every conceivable combination of colors for imitating grasshoppers. You don’t have to look hard for flies in pink, purple, or even lime green. They all work! But are tiers using these bright colors just to throw trout a curveball, or is there reason to use vivid colors? Do they mimic any natural coloration of real grasshoppers? Let’s find out.
The Standard Approach
Fish seeking terrestrials often hunt down the largest meal possible. But thanks to anglers, many trout get picky when grasshoppers start springing onto the water’s surface. They catch on when anglers repeatedly throw cleanly-tied, beautiful store-bought segmented foam flies. I’ve seen first hand trout that ignore those offerings. Despite the best cast, I can’t help but suspect these fish have previously been fooled. These fish might instead favor an unfamiliar, tattered fly simply because that different look doesn’t conjure any images in the trout brains to be anything BUT food. For 90% of hopper fishing, that shift in tactic might be all you need. But what about those trout that come up and nose at your fly, get so close to taking the bait and then decide that something is still off? Everything looks just right, except that the fish won’t commit. What can we do to provide fish a totally accurate look at a hopper, removing that doubt, while also avoiding the same-old predictable fly patterns that everyone else seems to be using? Could that be why pink, purple, or red hopper patterns are available?
Digging Deeper
Well I did some research so you won’t have to. I was able to dig up evidence from the natural world suggesting bright colors might actually be matching natural hoppers and found some explanations as to why fish take seemingly bizarre-colored patterns. Within the fly-fishing world, Boots Allen, author of Snake River Flies: Eighty Years of Proven Patterns for Fly Fishing Around the Globe, offers this insight: He notes that a grasshopper's coloration often matches their surrounding environment and that these insects even have the ability to change colors with the season. Shifting from the greens of late spring to match emergent grasses, to oranges, tans, and yellows, as foliage ripens and cures. As far as pinks and purples go, Allen seems to think that some hoppers exhibit these colors in an attempt to match the coloration of specific plant species. It may be camouflage, or tied to a grasshopper’s diet, or it may be both.
Building off of that, I dug into some scientific work, and uncovered details that may complicate and enrich Allen’s interpretation. Studies have explored the effects of temperature on grasshopper color changes, technically called color polymorphism. Temperature has a strong influence on hopper body color, more so than other factors, such as the color of the surrounding environment, population density or even relative humidity. Findings suggest that temperature changes over the course of a year (rising in spring, peak in summer, and again falling in autumn) directly influences body coloration. This evolved to help these cold-blooded insects thermoregulate (stay comfortable). As previously mentioned, this color matching also offers camouflage based on seasonal changes in the insect’s surroundings. Tanaka (2008) even noted that the timing of the color change may be different between males and females. Surprisingly, Valverde & Schielzeth (2015) specifically noted how grasshopper color changes do in fact include pinks, purples, yellows, and even blues!
Now, think about the diversity of colors in the 400+ species of grasshoppers in the Western U.S., each with varying abilities to shift color, different colorations between sexes, varying diets and habitat, and even different colorations as they mature throughout their lives. That’s a whole palette of color variations to choose from for fly tyers and anglers!
Now before you get too excited, a caveat. These insects are still prey, and have to blend into their surroundings to avoid predation. So seeing a strikingly pink grasshopper may be a bit far fetched, most are tan, gray, cream, yellow, green, brown, or even red in places with iron rich soil (at least on their underside, the viewpoint most important to trout and fly tyers).
Still, rich diversity exists, mainly in what I call accent colors. Every angler who has fished to picky trout (a fish that’s refused a perfect presentation) can attest that sometimes fish just key into specific details, like stripes, spots, bands, or brightly colored legs. So I plunged into the University of Wyoming’s guide to western grasshoppers, and parsed out the coloration trends amongst those 400+ western varieties. Several coloration trends became apparent.
Color Analysis
I categorize the common hopper colors into primary (abdomen) color, secondary (head and thorax) colors, and hind leg (not the femur) colors. Yes, it is subjective, but I stayed true to the field guide’s color descriptions. Based on their field guide descriptions, the following colors are most common in western grasshoppers.
Findings
Abdominal colors are fairly conservative (mainly tan, brown, green and yellow), but hind leg colors offer some striking colors, notably red and blue. How many hopper patterns do you see with the skinny hind leg segments in blue? Zero? After some testing last season, blue legs look cool on hopper flies, and fish just fine!
Caption: Custom Due West Anglers Grasshopper Fly
Maybe the trout aren’t really all that picky about overall hopper pattern design, they just get habituated after seeing the same old identical patterns, knowing there is a more colorful hopper to be munched on. With so many varieties available, maybe it’s time to come up with a fresh paint job for our hopper flies. All you need to customize your existing hoppers is a sharpie!
Author Bio:
Andy Witt writes for Paxis. He is a scientist and angler obsessed with chasing and understanding all gamefish, writes on the intersection of science, conservation, and fly fishing for Due West Anglers, based out of Denver, CO.
I offer custom fly orders upon request.
Sources:
Boots Allen. 2014. Snake River Flies: Eighty Years of Proven Patterns for Fly Fishing Around the Globe.
Valverde & Schielzeth. 2015. What triggers colour change? Effects of background colour and temperature on the development of an alpine grasshopper. BMC Evolutionary Biology.
Tanaka. 2008. Effects of temperature on body color change in the grasshopper Atractomorpha lata (Orthoptera: Pyrgomorphidae) with reference to sex differences in color morph frequencies. Entomological Science.
Don Roberts. Accessed 2019. Grasshoppers: The Only Kosher Insect. Northwest Fly Fishing Magazine.
P. Dieker, et al. 2018. Spatial analysis of two color polymorphism in an alpine grasshopper reveal a role of small-scale heterogeneity. Ecology and Evolution.
Anthony Joern. 2011. Grasshoppers. Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
University of Wyoming. Accessed 2019. Field Guide to Common Western Grasshoppers. http://www.uwyo.edu/entomology/grasshoppers/facttoc.htm#Gomphocerinae
USDA. Accessed 2022. Grasshopper Species Fact Sheet. https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/sidney-mt/northern-plains-agricultural-research-laboratory/pest-management-research/pmru-docs/grasshoppers-their-biology-identification-and-management/ipm-handbook/grasshopper-species-fact-sheets-scientific-name/
Pfadt. R. E. 2002. Field Guide to Common Western Grasshoppers. University of Wyoming. https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/30320505/GH_pdfs/FieldGde.pdf
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