page_title: Artificial fly
section_title: Imitation
hierarchical_section_title: Artificial fly / History / Imitation
caption_attribution_description: Woodcut of a Pike-Fly from The Book of Pike Pennell (1865)
context_page_description: An artificial fly or fly lure is a type of fishing lure, usually used in the sport of fly fishing. In general, artificial flies are an imitation of natural food sources that fly fishers present to their target species of fish while fly fishing. Artificial flies are constructed by fly tying, in which furs, feathers, thread or any of very many other materials are tied onto a fish hook. Artificial flies may be constructed to represent all manner of potential freshwater and saltwater fish prey to include aquatic and terrestrial insects, crustaceans, worms, baitfish, vegetation, flesh, spawn, small reptiles, amphibians, mammals and birds, etc. Effective artificial fly patterns are said to be killing flies because of their ability to put fish in the creel for the fly fisher. There are thousands of artificial fly patterns, many of them with descriptive and often idiosyncratic names.
context_section_description: A major concept in the sport of fly fishing is that the fly imitates some form of fish prey when presented to the fish by the angler. As aquatic insects such as Mayflies, Caddisflies and Stoneflies were the primary prey being imitated during the early developmental years of fly fishing, there were always differing schools of thought on how closely a fly needed to imitate the fish's prey.
  In the mid to late 19th century, those schools of thought, at least for trout fishing were: the formalists (imitation matters) and the colourists (color matters most).  Today, some flies are called attractor patterns because in theory, they do not resemble any specific prey, but instead attract strikes from fish.  For instance, Charles Jardine, in his 2008 book "Flies, Ties and Techniques," speaks of imitators and attractors, categorizing the Royal Wulff as an attractor and the Elk Hair Caddis as an imitator, whereas "... in sea trout and steelhead fishing there is a combination of imitation and attraction involved in fly construction".   Paul Schullery in American Fly Fishing – A History (1996) explains however that although much has been written about the imitation theories of fly design, all successful fly patterns must imitate something to the fish, and even a perfect imitation attracts strikes from fish.  The huge range of fly patterns documented today for all sorts of target species-trout, salmon, bass and panfish, pike, saltwater, tropical exotics, etc. are not easily categorized as merely imitative, attractors or  something else.
caption: Illustration of a large Pike fly (1865)[9]
exif: {"Image XResolution": "120", "Image YResolution": "120", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "160", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "88", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "Uncompressed", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Thumbnail StripOffsets": "399", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail RowsPerStrip": "88", "Thumbnail StripByteCounts": "42240", "Thumbnail XResolution": "120", "Thumbnail YResolution": "120", "Thumbnail PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "968", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "547", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "\u0007\u0007\u0007", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[3, 0, 0, 0]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "180"}