Quote Originally Posted by joe cool View Post
Just my initial thought about the question, but it seems like spiders/soft hackles as a whole are more general imitations to look buggy than something designed to match a specific food item,
Im not an expert or even close, and strange as this may sound - from what I have read and from various forum discussions from many very knowlegable UK anglers many of the old Spider Patterns were indeed designed to be very specific imitations. Whether this is true or not I cannot say.

Bear in mind that these patterns look completely different when wet.