Massive mayfly at my house in seattle

[Tristan Mikoleit]

Found this outside my house on my way home today. It looks like a gigantic mayfly, but that is as much as I know. Any thoughts?

 

[Stonefish]

Brown Drake?
SF

 

[long_rod_silvers]

Looks like a hex.

 

[Bob Newman]

Hexagenia

 

[long_rod_silvers]

Brown Drake?
SF

Also a good guess. Didn't know if that got that big.

 

[Stonefish]

That be cool if it was a hex.
I wonder what body of water in Seattle has them?

Time to stock some browns.
SF

 

[sroffe]

Probably should keep that a secret. That mud puddle might find itself over run with a bunch of crazy fly fishermen.

 

[jamma]

Definitely a hex, the photos of Brown drakes that I saw have some speckling on the wings.
Not necessarily a sign of good fishing, I saw one at my house that came from a large flat shallow lake near my house that holds exactly zero trout.

 

[Mark Melton]

Probably Hexagenia limbata, according to "Mayflies of Washington' by Meyer and MacCafferty and also by Bugguide.

http://www.ephemeroptera-galactica.com/pubs/pub_m/pubmeyerm2007p21.pdf

Mayfly - Hexagenia limbata

An online resource devoted to North American insects, spiders and their kin, offering identification, images, and information.

bugguide.net

 

[Bob Newman]

I used to have those sit on my screen door in Woodinville so guess what bodies of water they come from ?

Where I currently live I am more than a mile from a river and at least five miles from a lake but I get baetis from a river and callibaetis from a lake in horse troughs. They will fly a long ways from where they hatch.

 

[Tristan Mikoleit]

Would this be considered an abnormally large specimen?

 

[jamma]

Skip and I used to fish the hex hatch at the upper end of Merrill Lake. When we first started going up there the fishing was insane. I miss those days.

 

[Taxon]

Would this be considered an abnormally large specimen?

It would be considered unusually large for a winged mayfly, which have a body length range of less than 3 mm to about 37 mm, but not unusually large for a Hexagenia species.

 

[jamma]

It would be considered unusually large for a winged mayfly, which have a body length range of less than 3 mm to about 37 mm, but not unusually large for a Hexagenia species.

Yes, they are the largest mayfly. There are some massive hatches of these bugs in the northern midwest.

 

[jamma]

I used to have those sit on my screen door in Woodinville so guess what bodies of water they come from ?

Where I currently live I am more than a mile from a river and at least five miles from a lake but I get baetis from a river and callibaetis from a lake in horse troughs. They will fly a long ways from where they hatch.

I'm at least half a mile from my water source. Any water source with a muddy bottom can harbor these critters as the nymphs like to burrow into the substrate.