Just a spectacular insect: the spiny crawler mayfly, Ephemerella subvaria, beloved by fly fishermen for providing the "Hendrickson" hatch. The Rapidan remains the only place that I've found it, but then Beaty notes that it's "mountains only," and "rare." (No tolerance value has been assigned.)
I'll just post some photos today -- but I'll have more to say on this trip in a follow-up entry. Why? Because I found some Uenoids that I've not yet pinned down. They could be Neophylax atlanta -- a species that's noted as "rare" -- but I need to look at them closely and study my sources.
Dark heads -- no yellow/red spots or stripes, no obvious "tubercle" on the heads, and they do have clavate ventral gills. More later.
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The most common insect I saw today -- the pronggilled mayfly, genus Paraleptophlebia, but I didn't get any good photos! So we move on ----
1. Large winter stonefly, Taeniopteryx burksi-maura. This is the most mature nymph of the species I've seen so far this season. Note the way the back wing pads flare out from the body.
2. Perlodid stonefly, Isoperla montana. They're already showing their "stripes" (common name: "striped tails").
3. Giant stonefly, Pteronarcys proteus. Lovely pattern on the pronotum and wing pads.
3. Lepidostomatidae (Scaly-mouth caddisfly), genus Lepidostoma. There were a lot of them in the leaf packs. I photographed two.
And then there was this critter that didn't qualify as being "aquatic"!
