i have a white bg in my pond. without taking him out of the water it's hard to tell how light colored he actually is. i have been seeing him on and off when i feed. i really believe he is blind. he just kinda swims along under the other as they are feeding. i have never seen him surface. a guy that works for me today saw him, we watched him swim around and around under the dock. his ear tab is very noticeable, so now doubt it is a bg. he is probably about 9" long.
i am sure he is very rare so who wants to place the opening bid? hahaha
I honestly have at least 2 white bluegill also!! For the longest time I thought it was just one until I saw both at approx. same time 40 ft apart from each other. Just like Scott's mine "act" like they are blind. They just swim right below the surface during feeding. Very noticeable is they tend to swim on their side a lot. They are pretty large (8 inch or so) and out of thousands of cnbg at the feeder you can spot them standing out in just an instant. Kinda creepy looking. Maybe they are blind??
When a LMB goes blind, many times it gets very dark as opposed to going white.
I'd be curious about the predators. If blind, how did would the BG survive predation all this time?
Flame, could your white fish have some sort of disease? Swimming on their side doesn't sound good.
Hard to get a picture. They go under too quick. Maybe I can get a short video sometime but then would have to figure out how to post it.
Only predator fish are lmb and I just stocked them. They are mostly only about 9 inch long. We catch a few fish every week and all seem healthy with good rw. Maybe the "white" ones have been deep hooked before? Don't know how that would affect their color?
Via Bruce
They stand out like my 14 albino CC do. Sometimes we can count all of them at feeding time. We almost always see at least 11 when feeding (always by hand). I think if my little dock was a little farther into the pond they would eat out of my hand, but the water never gets more than 16" at the end of it.
Flame I have a few BG that swim flat on their side when feeding..... They are blind on one side , the eye is opaque from hook damage I presume
Many years ago I fished a perennially muddy lake. When I put a bass in the live well, I couldn't see it. The bass had no color, almost white. I always attributed it to no sunlight penetration.
DD1 here in Arkansas we have some dang muddy lakes like 4 inch vis. And you are correct on the sunlight penetration. Crappie, Bass and even BG are like this. I will catch LMB that look like White Bass dang near but as soon as you put them in some clear water for a while they will start to color back up some. I been here in AR for 26 years fishing in muddy waters and sometimes there is a great advantage to it if you know how to fish it!!
RC
Yeah, I like muddy water. Nothing beats a spinner bait and you can use heavier line.
Yup even stand up once in a while and stretch!! Us old guys need to do that every now and then... lol
RC
Yep, muddy water = pale fish!
And I agree on the spinnerbait, unless you can land the plastic in their mouth (so it seems in my case anyway).
my water is clearing up a little, haven't fertilized lately. i am getting a good look at the white bg.. he is really white! he has a large ear tab and i can see a few dark scale tips. definitely a male. he isnt just pale like some of the pics above. i dont get to fish often, but hopelfully i can catch him eventually. he isnt an aggressive eater like the rest so he may be hard to hook.
i thought i had already posted these pics, but looking back at the old thread i guess i didn't. they aren't good photos but you can tell he is white. i actually think i have 4 of them. they are completely different in nature than the normal colored ones. the big male i was seeing at first would always stay away from the crowd at the feeder. i could get all the bg feeding and see him over to the side and then toss him a few pellets. he would get one or 2 before the crowd came near him. he would then ease away. i could feed him a few at a time for quite some time. he also will follow me around the pond edge while i am driving the gator. when he takes a pellet he eases up under it and slowly gets vertical to suck it in. the other bg in the pond hit the pellets wide open. a guy that works for me got him to take a popping bug once. he stuck him for a split second, but he came off. maybe one day we can get our hands on one of them for a good picture.
Bruce posted pics of several white BG.
here is his post
And a littler male, about 4.5-5 inches.
ewest-i wonder if most of his were this color when he caught this particular one? maybe due to water color? i have seen very pale fish in muddy water, but that isn't the case with mine. i have 2500 dark colored bg and then this few white ones. once again what gets me is their odd behavior while feeding. totally different than the others. i thought the ole big white male was blind at first, but he isn't.
May have an inferiority complex problem............. all the other little fishes would not play with him when he was a fingerling.
They never got the "diversity" memo.
Seriously, in the animal kingdom something that looks out of the ordinary is not always treated well.
I think the white BG of scott69 is more white and possibly an albino or close to albino. The BG of Condello is just a light phase regular BG. If scott69 ever catches one of his whiteBG closer pictures will better tell the story.
Conditioning or genetics ? One leads to the other. Its the circle of life.
I think differences in genetics is affecting both fish with different color patterns.
