Quote Originally Posted by Byron haugh View Post
Even the flyfisherman'so common names for the insects we try to imitate have "color" in the name......blue Winged Olive, Pale Morning Dun, Rusty Spinner, Gray Drake, March Brown, Mahogany Dun, etc., etc., etc.
Yes, they do. However, that may have more to do with the fact that we recognize the different insects by color rather than the fish recognizing them by color.

I'm trying to remember who (Charlie Fox, maybe? Bergman?) who would demonstrate holding an insect overhead in the day light, and it's color was always black. Only when the sun was low on the horizon did color become visible. (This probably pertains more to dry flies than, say nymphs.)

There's an article in the current issue of American Angler entitled "Confessions of a Color Heretic". He puts forth the argument that color almost never matters, although he does allow that in off-color water, a color that's easier for the fish to see is more likely to be taken. I don't 100% agree with him; if for no other reason that there are other times when visibility comes into play, and there's still the matter of light vs dark as opposed to hue. I've fished the white fly hatch a couple of times with two otherwise identical soft hackles, one white and one dark just to see what would happen, and as we would all like to believe, the dark one didn't get much attention. OTOH, I've fished peacock herl bodied dries during a sulfur hatch before and done fairly well. I think that color may very well matter in some circumstances, but it's a distant third to presentation and form.