Unidentified sunfish
- Thread starter Jakesfish
- Start date
Btw yours isn't stressed, it's just a female shell cracker
Lol like I said I just got the pics from Google. I didn't catch these monsters, even though I would've loved to. But yeah as you can see from the pics is that they do get some size to them but it'll take em 3-5 years to get anywhere close to that size. They grow pretty fast when they are young but slow down quite a bit once they are a year old. Once they reach 8in tho the tend to speed up the growth rate again since they can actively hunt baitfish at that point.
I know atm I got a few pumpkin seed x green sunfish hybrids I'm growing out to try and breed. The hybrids keep the body/color of the pumpkin seed while gaining the mouth size and blue beard of the green sunfish. Here's a pic of one I got atm and another bigger adult that I caught.
It looks quite similar to a redear but im not sure it is. The body shape and the amount of blue on the opercular seems to suggest its something else. After digging around for a while i am leaning more towards a female lepomis humilis, the orange spotted sunfish.
Definitely, assuming the duller one is a female. All sunfish can hybridize with each other even if they aren't the same species.
Definitely no green sunfish in there. Even juvenile greens have longer faces, they don't have pointy forked tails, and this guy's sunfish doesn't have the orange rimmed fins. I agree with the pumpkinseed bit though. Either pumpkinseed or longear, hard to tell when young
Definitely not a hybrid either, all green sunfish hybrids keep the orange rimmed fins.
It's possible but the only problem is that the pics OP has doesn't have the traditional white outline around the "ear tag" that the orange spotted pumpkin seed has, it's just a flat black ear tag which makes me lean towards a female shell cracker. This here is a pic of a moderate sized, female shell cracker. Notice how the female lacks the red color on its ear tag, while the male has the red color on his ear tag. Granted this female has already gotten big enough to start losing some of its blue color around its face.
Granted we could all be wrong and it could very easily be a wild hybrid of some kind. If that's the case we can only do guess work on what combination of sunfish it could be.
