strange fish i caught fishing
- Thread starter MrGrayMySkipper
- Start date
It's easier to tell definitively if all the fins are extended, but otherwise it has 100% the characteristics of a green sunfish. Unless it's a green sunfish hybrid (which is less likely), it's definitely a green sunfish.
You do have them there. They're listed as being in every major drainage in MN, and for that matter I've caught them there myself.
Though some of your variants may look a bit different than the fish posted, so you may not have known what they were. Or you may be mistaking some of them for bluegill, which is pretty common for people to do.
Might be a bluegill/green sunfish hybrid. many large pond/small lake owners stock hybrid bluegill/green sunfish because they have much larger mouths than either of the two. They are quite aggressive at bait and will whack at what ever you are using with out much thought.
The mouth size on the hybrid is about the same as a green sunfish (large).
So they don't hybridize to make a fish with a bigger mouth than a green sunfish. But the hybrids DO have a larger mouth than a bluegill, which is an advantage.
A few other reasons are because stocking hybrids tends to lessen the chance of overpopulation (the hybrids aren't as prolific), and because the hybrids tend to grow faster than either of the 2 individual species. They also may grow larger.
Green sunfish by themselves are aggressive feeders, but they don't grow as large as a bluegill or a greengill (common name for bluegill/green cross), and don't grow as fast as a greengill. They are also prolific enough to quickly overrun a body of water.
That said, the fish above looks like a normal green sunfish. It may have bluegill mixed in somewhere in its lineage (which is possible of any sunfish, since Lepomis sp. will hybridize periodically even in the wild in very large bodies of water), but does not appear to be a 50/50 bluegill and green sunfish cross.
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