Hybrid Sunfish

[FishnDave]

I flyfished a new-to-me public pond yesterday afternoon.  Caught bass, bluegills, pumpkinseed sunfish, and at least 2 types of Hybrid Sunfish.

Got me thinking about other hybrids I've caught.  How different, yet consistent within their types, they look.

Most of mine are Green Sunfish x Bluegill hybrids.  Some are Pumpkinseed x Bluegill, one is (maybe?) Redear x Bluegill, others...who knows.  Since there are so many Longear Sunfish in Missouri, have any of you caught their hybrids?  I wonder what a Green Sunfish x Redear hybrid would look like....

[ness]

Looks like a fun day!

How deep are you catching these?

[JUNGLE JIM 1]

Those certainly look bigger than what I catch here, really nice variety of colors. There are more hybrids now than there was 20 years and will probably have more different crosses in the future.

[Johnsfolly]

Bluegill and green sunfish crosses that I am used to have those big mouths. I know thay I have some bluegill and green hybrid photos myself. I'll  look and see if I have any lomgear hybrid photos. 

[FishnDave]

4 hours ago, ness said:

Looks like a fun day!

How deep are you catching these?

I caught a fair number today...to be clear, only the first 4 fish in the pictures were caught today, and only 3 of them are hybrids.  Its always fun when the fish are cooperative.  Catching beats not catching...and fishing beats not fishing...right?  The ones I caught today were a mix of depths...some were guarding nests practically at the water's edge.   But even the ones away from shore were caught "shallow"....like maybe 2.5' or less.  I could see some pods of bluegills swimming just under the surface out in the middle of the small pond.  They'd scatter and reform when something large seemed to chase them.

[tjm]

color varies so much within some species that I'm not sure I'd know a hybrid, but I'm curious if the hybrids are fertile? and if they are why aren't all the sunfish just subspecies?

[FishnDave]

On 6/26/2020 at 1:25 PM, tjm said:

color varies so much within some species that I'm not sure I'd know a hybrid, but I'm curious if the hybrids are fertile? and if they are why aren't all the sunfish just subspecies?

That's a great question...I've wondered along those lines too.

I believe they ARE fertile.  I've read that 90+% of Hybrid Sunfish are of one gender.  That is part of the variety I see sometimes....where it looks like a hybrid bred back with a purebred, and so the new hybrid often looks a LOT more like one of the parent species, but not quite.  Punnett Squares and all that genetic stuff. 

Hybrids are sometimes stocked, but do occur naturally.  I've caught them from almost every body of water I fish, but they are usually a very low percentage of the catch.

[tjm]

Half of the sun fish I've caught over the last sixty years were just "sunfish"  that could have been hybrid or just odd colored, for several years one hole in the creek gave up really thick completely black sunfish of unknown brand two or three times a year and then they disappeared. And not being an ichthyologist, I don't always even try to identify fish past the family name and how much bend they put in the flyrod. 

[FishnDave]

38 minutes ago, tjm said:

Half of the sun fish I've caught over the last sixty years were just "sunfish"  that could have been hybrid or just odd colored, for several years one hole in the creek gave up really thick completely black sunfish of unknown brand two or three times a year and then they disappeared. And not being an ichthyologist, I don't always even try to identify fish past the family name and how much bend they put in the flyrod. 

Those black sunfish sound interesting.  I've caught some very black Green Sunfish and Bluegills.  I suppose melanism and albinism occur occasionally in fish most fish populations.  Do you have any pictures of those?

[tjm]

21 hours ago, FishnDave said:

Do you have any pictures of those?

Fishing alone and not being especially nimble, I  rarely get pictures of fish even when I carry a camera and those were probably before digital, 30 years ago, maybe.  Yeah, the first one looked like a bluegill for shape but over the years they were there I caught some that might have been hybridized with ???, other than the almost solid color what I recall most is how thick they were across the "shoulders".  May have been greens, at the time I guessed they were mixed. Had a very strong inclination to stay on the bottom.  It was especially interesting because most fish in this very clear creek tend not be dark.