Arctic Cased Caddis

A far-northern genus — the reference photo behind this card is Icelandic, and that's the right country for it: cold, fast-to-moderate rocky streams are exactly its water. The larva builds a case from cobble and sand and, unusually for a cased caddis, spends real time dead-drifting in the current before it ever gets around to emerging, rather than the more familiar pattern of clinging to the case and staying put. That makes the nymph a searching fly worth fishing on the drift through summer, not just at a hatch window — emergence itself happens by crawling out onto the bank at any hour, so there's no surface event to time your evening around, only the nymph doing the work.

This stage isn't generally imitated — the other stage is the one worth fishing.

• ScandinaviaCommon
• The AlpsScarce
• North America — WestScarce
• North America — EastScarce

Apatania is a genus of caddisflies in the family Apataniidae. There are at least 90 described species in Apatania.