Kodiak sea louse

The article on the Kodiak Sea Louse has rather piqued my curiosity. Here in Washington and British Columbia the term "sea louse" is commonly applied to a small (usually around 1/4 inch in length), tear-drop shaped, dorsally flattened copepod which attaches itself to saltwater fish, usually somewhere near the vent. These parasites persist for a while on salmon, steelhead and sea-run cutthroat entering fresh water on their spawning runs; unable to tolerate the change in salinity levels, they usually die and drop off in a day or two. These are the sea lice whose excessive numbers in proximity to commercial net pens where Atlantic salmon are reared, like areas near British Columbia's Broughton Archipelago, have been blamed for the decimation of outmigrating pink salmon fry.


The fly depicted in the article looks much more like a Mysid, a shrimp-like crustacean sometimes referred to as an "eel-grass shrimp", a staple in the diet of many anadromous fish at certain periods of their saltwater lives. It is particularly important to young chinook salmon and to sea-run cutthroat. Although the range of the Dolly Varden (except in a few high alpine streams) doesn't extend south into Washington, we do have anadromous bull trout whose life histories and habits are very similar. These also feed heavily, in and around the estuaries and along the beaches of Puget Sound, on these inch-long creatures.

Hmmmmmm, got my thinking gears grinding abit. Might need to give this a try in the Skagit estuary.

As I stated in the little write-up I have watched the dollies picking sea lice from the salmon flanks... And anecdotally I have seen salmon in dolly-rich systems devoid of sea lice very quickly while hanging onto them for considerable time in systems with fewer dollys. Sea lice here run significantly longer than 1/4".

While it is the copepod I was attempting to mimic in the initial stages I am not convinced the fly does it all that well either. The things I know for certain however moot the point; the Kodiak Sea Louse is simply the best dolly fly I have ever seen and works under lots of different conditions including saltwater, the addition of UV materials made a tremendous difference in how well the fly worked, the feeding method is so very different between the fly line and dollys picking the sea lice off directly that it is hard to make a solid connection between sea lice and the pattern. But it does work, whatever the image assumed by the fish... ;)
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Kerry
Please let me know how they work if you do...
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