Well, largemouth bass and smallmouth bass are also sunfish... depends what you mean by sunfish. I've personally caught green sunfish at 10 inches and have caught bluegill and rock bass that were definitely pushing the 12 inch mark, even caught a crappie on a live bluegill while bass fishing that came in at 17 inches.
I caught a new state yearly record.
- Thread starter Rtc/tsn
- Start date
Sunfish are referring to bluegill, long ear, pumpkin seed etc…
Centrarchidae, the "sunfish" family, encompasses rock bass, largemouth, smallmouth bass. Around my way we generally say "panfish" when referring to the smaller sunfish.
I would say bluegill are easily the larger growing of them all on average. In years past I would routinely pull bluegill out of ivy lake at around 12-15" and fat!
And a lot of people overlook them as a sportfish. Let me tell you a 12+ inch 1-2Ib bluegill will give you a real good fight especially on light gear. Much more fun to catch then your average 1-2.5Ib bass imo.
Most definitely better than bass, the only thing is there rarely reach big enough size to give that good of a fight and even then ya hard to catch the bigger ones because the smaller faster blues get to the bait first. If they were commonly caught at 9+ inches then they would definitely be more popular than bass
No, I don’t have the proper sized tank for a gill of that size but if I did then I most definitely would have. I currently have a 55g but getting a 75g in January 2022
