The late master angler, Ed Hewett, said he believed many trout fed on natural ants because they tasted good. I don’t know about this, but I’ve encountered many situations when I found out that the tough trout took my artificial ants much more frequently than I would normally expect.
One of these situations occurred during a heavy beatis hatch one fall on a small stream in Montana. I had a beginning angler friend with me and I had positioned him where he could get easy casts to several browns rising to the olives beside a willow stump. He caught several of these trout trout on a CDC Blue Wing Olive size 20, but the large brown back under those willows would not take this dry, even though he would come up and look at it.
Just for curiosity, I suggested that my friend remove the Blue Wing Olive and replace it with a size 18 Mr. Rapidan Ant.
My friend’s presentation cast fell 4 feet short of the target and much to our surprise the large brown trout swam over and took the ant solidly.
One day I was fishing the heavy water on the Madison River below Quake Lake with size 6 Heavy Stonefly Nymphs in hopes of digging out some of the Large Trout that fed deeply on these Natural Nymphs. On my first upstream dead drift, a very large rainbow turned on my Nymph but refused to take it. Two more drifts brought him out to look at my big nymph, but he would not take it. I knew exactly where he was holding and there was a dinner plate slick of flat water beside him which was clearly in his window. I removed my large nymph, tapered down to a 6x tippet and attached a Mr. Rapidan Dry Ant size 16. On the first drift, that that large rainbow pulled up under my ant and took it solidly.
One of my most successful ploys with small dry ants is to fish them to trout which have come up to investigate regular drys, but refuse to take them. I honestly believe that over half of these trout take the ants solidly on the first drift.