I have had BG on the beds for the last 3 1/2 months. The males are actively defending the nests but I have only observed a mating pair on a nest twice in all that time. I am thinking that I have hybrid BG which might explain the abundance of beds as well as the shortage of females. Am I off base with this thinking? I have only owned the pond for 8 months so this is the first year of spawning activity I have been able to observe.
Marc,
Sounds very plausible considering up to 90 percent of hybrid bluegills (the commerical ones that are BG X Green Sunfish) are males.
Thank you Cecil. If I were to add true blue BG should I thin the hybrid herd at the same time? I am also dealing with skinny bass which is another indication of poor BG spawning. Can you recommend a supplier of BG in our area? What would be the minimum size BG you would add to get a successful spawn next spring?
Marc/Cecil -- just one small observation that may or may not be helpful. I fished one our ponds with good bluegills near the end of June. There is always a spawning colony on one particular point where a gravel bar runs out into the pond. The bluegills were there, as always. :-) Anyway, when I threw my jig/twister tail up in 3 feet of water, I always caught a male. However, when the wind drifted us off the bar, all the fish we caught in 5-6 feet of water were females. So, would the females gather near the colony, but not come in except to spawn?? I hate to draw a strong conclusion because this was just one day on one pond. However, that was my thought.
Actually, when I first saw Marc's post, I quietly waited to see if we could get a bunch of observations here. I was hoping to learn something! So, if any of you bluegill pondmeisters out there read this, please respond with your observations, even if limited. Thanks.
Dave
In my reproduction pond I still have males actively guarding nests. There aren't as many but they are there just the same. I also caught a female this morning that I could squeeze lightly and was expressing eggs. I've also been observing YOY fish for five weeks, so I'm having typicaly multiple spawns. I've never seen a female visually near a bed. They definitely like to hang a little deeper.
About 3 weeks ago at the spawning beds, the bg were all bunched up together. I'm talking about 40 - 50 large bg in a spot the size of a car windsheild. Later they were all spread out about a foot apart or so. I'm not sure if there were any female bg in the huddle. Why do they do this?
Marc , Dave , CB1 and Bruce :
This is a very interesting thread. Like Dave I waited to post to see what others said. You will know why when you read below.
Based on this post I began to think if I had ever seen large numbers of male and female BG on the beds at the same time. I went and checked my notes that cover about 8 years of observations--no such entries. How many times have you seen large numbers of male and female BG on the nests at the same time ?
This led led me to the strange observation of BG behavior I encountered on the day of the full moon on the May 05 spawn . For reference the May spawn is the biggest of 4-5 spawns a year in our area. In this lake there is a clay and rock point in water from 1-6 ft. deep that is about 50 ft. long. There are easily 150 nests on this point. The water was clear {visa. 4 ft.} as the bloom was just starting.
I walked down to the lake about noon and what I saw made me dizzy. From about 4 ft. above and 30 ft. away I saw on and over the point hundreds of male BG with one over each nest. Each nesting male BG was swimming feverishly in counter clockwise circles over his nest. The mass of circling male BG made me dizzy if I watched it for very long. My in-laws who were there said they had not seen this in the 50 years sense the lake was built. There were probably some that were not going in a counter clockwise direction but I did not see them. The amazing part upon reflection is that I never saw a female in the hour I watched over the afternoon . I know they were there because my notes 3 weeks later reflect a massive hatch of yoy BG fry .
I now wonder if {as I suspect} the female BG wait until low light conditions to quickly move up to the nests from deeper water and place their eggs and leave . Anyone have any opinions on what I observed ? I was not in an impaired condition so don't ask if that was the reason for what I encountered. ewest
ewest, that's an amazing account of your experience. Almost like it wasn't supposed to be witnessed by humans. Mother Nature can put on quite a show.
For what it's worth, I fish alot, and always see males on the beds alone. I went yesterday as a matter of fact, and didn't see all that many males still on beds (maybe 5 males total) but it was only them on the beds.
Many thanks for the observations, guys! One parallel that I can draw involves birds. Prairie chickens and sharptailed grouse set up dancing grounds (leks) in the spring. Males each have a defined territory, about like a male bluegill having his own spawning depression. Apparently, the most central male chicken/grouse does most of the breeding. The most dominant males are in the center. Females appear, hang around the fringes, but obviously don’t need to be there very long to breed. Thus, the males are highly visible and the females are only occasionally seen. The difference, of course, is that the females leave to lay their eggs alone, compared to the male bluegills guarding the eggs. I don’t know if anyone has ever worked out the hierarchy of bluegill dominance and spawning. However, they obviously have a lot of behaviors that we don’t know very well, as evidenced by the relatively recent knowledge of the small size at maturity for the “cuckold” males.
Ditto,
When I was a fishing fool in public waters (public waters are inferior to my ponds now so I dont' go much
) I noticed males only on the beds more times than not. In fact, when fishing for them in New England where they are considered trash fish, I have caught over 100 off the beds with not one being a female. Just as with the largemouth bass which is in the sunfish family it's entirely possible the females only show up briefly.
BTW I no longer wipe out colonies of bluegills as I know better. However in New England there is no competition as the locals would rather catch a 10 inch stocked trout vs. a 10 inch bluegill.
I simply answered Marc Z's question in regards to it being possible many of his males were hybrids -- that is if he had hybrids in the pond.
Marc,
Did you plant hybrids exclusively? If not, then it's highly possible you have regular males on their nests.
Cecil: I did not stock any fish. I am working with fish that were already there when I bought the place. Thanks to all for the responses to the initial question. Many times I have also observed the counterclockwise swimming of the bg mentioned in one of the previous post. This past weekend when I was at the pond, a weekend getaway at the moment, the colony I was observing went from 22, 100% occupied nests to only 6 occupied nests. This change happened sometime between 8-1-05 and 8-4-05. There was one pair of bg in the largest diameter nest over this past weekend and they were doing the counterclockwise swim routine. The other 5 nests were not following suit. Usually when I have observed the counterclockwise routine they would all do it at the same time.
I have looked at picures of bg trying to identify the ones I have as pure or hybrids and am having much difficulty. Is there one main characteristic of the hybrid that is a dead on identifier? If not maybe I can post a picture of one for the help of the forum. What a great site! Thanks again to all!
When hybrids flash or turn at a bait or move about on the nest I can usually see the gold border to the fins that is not present in pure strain bluegill.
Thanks for the pictures. Is the light colored edge on the fins always so obvious or can it be more subtle from fish to fish. My bg do not have an obvious light edge like the pics but the edges do look a little lighter than the rest of the fin.
Marc :
Not always as obvious. Please see Bill
Cody's 2 posts on the second of the ref. threads regarding regression . That is one of the things that makes sunfish iding hard when dealing with mixes. Also see same thread and the post with another ref. which includes written description and pic. of green sunfish. ewest