My name is Jason Neuswanger. My fishing friends call me "Troutnut." Enough people email me with questions about my background that I decided to describe it here.

Scientist-in-training


In 2012 I expect to complete my Ph.D. in biology (specializing in trout & salmon ecology) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I'm studying the feeding behavior of juvenile Chinook salmon in the Chena River in central Alaska. I helped advance some mathematical methods and built software (VidSync) to analyze fine-scale fish feeding behavior in 3-D using paired video cameras. I'm using that system to study the effect of the ubiquitous tiny debris in most streams as a distraction for drift-feeding fish. I'm also studying the competitive behavior of these fish, which are found in tight schools, yet appear to defend distinct territories within them. These behaviors -- schooling and territoriality -- are usually viewed as polar opposites, and I have a unique vantage point to study them in a system where they intersect.

My work is part of the broader Chena River Chinook Salmon Study.

The Fisherman


I started fly fishing in July of 2003 after a brief stint as an avid worm dunker left me fascinated with trout but annoyed with my methods. I had received a fly rod the previous Christmas and I liked the prospect of catching trout without carrying several cups of easily overheated dirt in my fishing vest.

I borrowed a copy of Ernest Schwiebert's encyclopedic 2-volume Trout from a friend and read much of it. I learned to cast through his fluid prose, and I read about the excitement of hatch-matching, though I was not yet ready to apply it.

I vividly remember my first trout on the fly. It was a muggy July afternoon and I was hoping for a blizzard hatch of "White Flies," whatever those were (Ephoron mayflies, it turns out). I had just bought some dry flies at a local sport shop, but I didn't really know what was what.
My first trout on the fly, a respectable 14-inch brown.
My first trout on the fly, a respectable 14-inch brown.
Toward dusk some very large mayflies started bobbing and weaving over the water. I did not yet know a hatch from a spinner flight from a spinner fall, but I tied on a scruffy Hexagenia limbata dun imitation and started flailing it around. I had trouble keeping it afloat on the riffly water, and one especially turbulent current tongue swallowed my fly. I strained my eyes to see it but I gave up. Yet when I pulled up for the next cast, it did not come! My rod bent and I felt a fish tugging. I dared not assume it was a wily trout, and I contained my excitement until I was sure I was not connected to a snagged redhorse. A respectable 14-inch brown trout found its way into my net and was photographed and released. I later learned that the large mayfly spinners were Hexagenia atrocaudata, a sparse and rarely fishable hatch, and I doubt my catch had anything to do with them. But it did a lot for me.

I started tying flies in early November of the same year, and I quickly grew frustrated with the limited color plates in the many excellent books on stream insects that I had by then collected. I needed to see the real thing, so I borrowed a kick net and started collecting insects from my streams.

The Website


I quickly learned that any insect preserved in a vial of chemicals is a poor representative of the vibrant living thing. A better method of preservation was photography, and I started to photograph the insects I collected.

The familiar face of Troutnut.com through most of the first two years of its existence.
The familiar face of Troutnut.com through most of the first two years of its existence.
I posted some of the pictures on Internet forums and everyone seemed to like them. I needed a way to store and organize them anyway, and since I had much experience working as a web programmer (it was the ultimate high school job for a computer geek in the 90s) the natural choice was to create a website. Troutnut.com was born in February of 2004.

By the end of the year, I was getting bored with the tedium of updating the website by hand. By now I had a grand vision of what the site could be, derived from abstract ideas about information architecture and related buzzwords. It would require learning two new programming languages, but it would be worth it to improve the site so much and make updates a matter of spending minutes on web forms rather than hours in computer code.

I thought it would take me a month or two. It took twenty, about half of which were mostly full-time work. The project ballooned beyond anything I originally imagined, and it included learning technical photography. I was driven in part by the inspiring words Gary LaFontaine wrote in his foreword to Knopp and Cormier's Mayflies: An Angler's Study of Trout Water Ephemeroptera :

Here’s a tip for anyone working on an angling entomology – never ask yourself before, during, or after if it’s worth it. Never let the slightest hint of sanity taint the compulsion that is the foundation of such a pursuit.

I have asked myself if it's worth it, and the answer is an unequivocal yes.

The Person


I was born in 1980 in the middle of nowhere: northeastern Missouri. By the "middle of nowhere," I don't mean that it was far from any city (it was, but that's a good thing), but that it was far from any trout streams. Because my father is a fishery biologist, I started fishing at the age of 2 or so, and I was obsessed with it.

The Troutnut fishing a Catskill tailwater.
The Troutnut fishing a Catskill tailwater.
From age 10-12 I spent (Spent: The wing position of many aquatic insects when they fall on the water after mating. The wings of both sides lay flat on the water. The word may be used to describe insects with their wings in that position, as well as the position itself.) much of my time poking around a couple of very small streams within bicycle or walking range of my house in the woods. They were too warm and intermittent to hold trout, but many minnows lived there and I learned their taxonomy and sought every local species for my aquarium like a collector. I remember my dad showing me what caddisflies were at one point, but I never became really interested in invertebrates at the time.

In 8th grade I saw Carl Sagan's Cosmos video series and read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Those things set me down the path toward a career in astrophysics and I ended up at Cornell University's excellent astronomy program as an undergraduate. After a few years I realized that field did not suit me, and I took some time off. Around that time my parents moved from Missouri to northwest Wisconsin, a rich landscape of evergreen forests laced with fertile trout streams.

I spent (Spent: The wing position of many aquatic insects when they fall on the water after mating. The wings of both sides lay flat on the water. The word may be used to describe insects with their wings in that position, as well as the position itself.) a year and a half back there, during which I developed the initial version of this website. I also learned how my knack for applied math and computer programming could be applied toward fish in the blossoming field of quantitative fisheries science, so I returned to Cornell and finished my degree as a mathematics major. Some fascinating classes on mathematical and behavioral ecology drew me into a corner of fishery science that led straight to a Ph.D. program in beautiful Alaska.