Rating panfish aggresiveness
- Thread starter ksauers
- Start date
Redbreasted sunfish are extremely aggressive. Mine killed my black crappie recently and attacks everything but my pickerel and that's just because my pickerel used to try and eat him. I would go with a tank with two black crappie and a white crappie. They are schooling fish and would be cool to have in a species tank. I loved my black crappie before it was killed.
Years of keeping all species of sunfish and I can still never tell who is going to be a bully and who's going to be a pushover. In my experience the species with the most potential for aggression are green sunfish, bluegill, longears, and pumpkinseed. Least aggressive that I've had are warmouth, blue spotted, orange spotted, crappie, and shaddow bass. That being said, there are always fish that don't fit the mold. I've had greenies, bluegill, and longears that have been really good community fish as well. Raising fish up from juvies and feeling them out is the only way to tell who's gonna be who in a tank.
Bluegill are very aggressive but my green sunfish and crappie ate pretty passive. I think it really depends on your tank conditions though.
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I have a redbreast that holds his own with my sa cichlids. War mouth and crappie are not aggressive enough and are hard to feed. Largemouth bass are good fish, act Just like pbass
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For a 75 g the least aggressive are going to be Orangespotted and Bantam Sunfish (small), Warmouth and Redear (big Sunfish), Shadowbass and Northern Longear (medium). Your most aggressive sunfish (average) are the Green, Redbreast, Rockbass,Pumpkinseed (large);Western and Eastern Dollar sunny, Mo (or Kansas) Longear sunny (medium sized) and the sunnies who kind of fall in the middle of Aggressive scale are the Bluegill, Spotted, Northern Longear and Mud Sunfish. This is not true of all individual fish.....only an average taken from my own experience and from the reading of others experiences.
In the sunfish family IME the most aggressive have been Green sunfish, Bluegill and Smallmouth bass. Pumpkinseed have been somewhere in the middle and the banded/blue spotted have been mild. Haven't kept LMB over 12 inches so I wouldn't really know and haven't kept the other species.
my louisiana longear is the tough guy in the tank, despite being 2" and 4" smaller than the larger 2 bluegills. I have 2 warmouth, one is tough, the other a wimp. the other fish are too small to really tell, but the ohio basin longears are kind of bossy, and the pumpkinseeds usually bicker among themselves more than the others. my greens are the smallest 3 in the tank so mostly spend their time hiding.
I've also noticed differences in aggression depending on the environment they were collected from. I collected some juvie green sunfish and longears from some very isolated small streams and they are extremely aggressive, whereas fish collected from larger bodies of water like lakes and larger creeks and rivers haven't been as aggressive.