Tricos - is too much of a good thing too much?

[ScottP]

I've seen this with caddis hatches -- blizzard hatch, fish feed like crazy for a couple hours, and then quit even though there are still many bugs on the water.

I've seen that a number of times on the Madison; they're going crazy for the caddis emergence then switch gears and start on the epeorus (pink lady) hatch. The CDC & Elks and Clackas which had been magic just a few minutes before were ignored and they only wanted the mayfly. Riseforms were a bit different but it took me a good 20 minutes to figure out things had changed; it was also pretty dark by that time and I had trouble spotting the duns coming down the feeding lanes.

I haven't ever seen it with tricos. Although, my impression is that you need really good numbers of tricos on the water to get fishing rising well. If the tricos aren't' very thick, the fish never really get started except for a few scattered smaller fish.

They were thick, very thick, but the trout ignored them. I'm thinking they may have been feeding on sunken spinners since I could see a number of trout feeding subsurface (or they could have been feeding on the multitude of other stuff coming down the pipeline - sowbugs, midge pupa, nymphs, etc).

Regards,
Scott