Spirit River UV2 marabou

[tenniswyse]

Bought some of this material and shined a uv light on it and also on jay fair's non uv marabou, I could not see any noticeable difference. I also have some of Doug Swisher's uv material and when you shine a uv light on it really lights up. Not sure if the spirit river stuff is worth it. Any comments?

[Darian]

According to everything I've read, UV rays are not in the visible light spectrum for humans. Accordingly, when materials "light up" you're seeing reflection of visible light rays.

I really don't have any anecdotal evidence to support or deny whether UV materials work or not but I do mix them up in tying my own flies, just in case. One caveat, I wouldn't use marabou that has been dyed and had UV added to it without closely inspecting it before buying. Some dyed marabou appears to become brittle or matted by that process.

[SST Flies]

"Manufactured" UV is nothing more than an optical enhancer. You can buy the cheapest liquid at nearly any Safeway in the soap aisle. Look for Mrs. Stewarts (bluing agent).

As mentioned above use caution on which materials you choose to dye or buy. However, it can be chemically altered to soften materials, too. Although it will be cheaper to buy materials at this point- unless you intend to dye pounds of material(s).

[JD]

Darian outlined the gist of it. As I understand it, when you shine a UV light on a material and you see it glow, that is UV fluorescence which we see in the visible spectrum. The theory is that fish see further into the UV spectrum than humans, and thus UV reflective materials should be more attractive, but humans cannot see UV light reflect because we cannot see into that spectrum. There is a bunch on literature on this, much of which points out that salmonids may not actually see very far into the UV spectrum except at certain stages in their lives, but that has not prevented a bunch vendors from hawking UV enhanced materials as the next big thing. The trick is that humans cannot see UV light reflect, so there is really no way to compare materials. Reed Curry has a book "The New Scientific Angling - Trout and Ultraviolet Vision" that outlines the argument for UV, but I'm a little leery of the "science" behind it especially in the context of some of the scientific papers out there on fish vision. Here's a brief article that outlines some of these points: http://midcurrent.com/flies/shining-...-uv-materials/

Ultimately the effectiveness of UV reflective materials has been known for years in fly tying. The white wing of the Prince Nymph is an excellent example. Alleged UV treatments of materials I'm a little less confident in, but as with others I do sometimes like to add in some of the various UV dubbing materials to add a bit more flash to a pattern. I add them to enhance the pattern to my eye, not because I believe they are more greatly UV reflective. More often than not, I forget to add a dubbing enhancer and guess what, the flies still catch fish.