Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Greensunfish Bluegill Redears

I've been messing around with small ponds for over 30 years and thought I would offer my unsolicited opinion and how I manage these bream.
Where I live any sunfish is called a Bream.

I have had remarkable success putting mature red ears into small ponds (under 2 acres) that only contained bluegill and bass. 3 years after stocking the big redears I began to catch some redear/blugill hybrids. These are realy beatiful fish and I've caught several that go over the 1 lb mark. The only drawback is the hybrids have become dominate and the bluegill population has fallen off. Now each year I add some mature bluegills to the mix to keep the bass happy.

As for greensunfish we built a 1/2 acre pond on a running creek. After it filled it was full of greenfish that came from the creek. I was going to do the standard bass/ bluegill stocking but didn't really want those greenfish eating my expensive minnows. Solution was to stock 75 channel cats. The catfish didn't realy clean out the greenfish but did help keep them in check. Next step was to move 15 2lb bass from our other pond. Now this was the ticket cause the bass grew like crazy and the greenfish population really began to go down. I was afraid the bass were going to run out of food so I began moving some bluegills in. Now 4 years after the pond was finished The catfish are about 5 lbs. The bass are around 4 lbs and I catch very few small bass.
And the bluegill and green sunfish have crossed and now I have homegrown "Georgia Giants" hybrids. In conclusion if you have too many greensunfish put is some predators and take advantage of the free food.

very good post, db. If things could work out like yours has, I think most would like to have the infamous GG, in their ponds.

Am I correct to assume it was relative few Redears in with the pond full of BG?

DB :

Interesting post. I believe what you are doing is is called managing the situation in your ponds as opposed to starting over. There are many ways to do so and your is interesting. Many on this fourm do like wise.

I would be interested in your discription of how a BG/RE cross looks and the general location of the ponds. ewest

Description of BG/RE: good. Picture: better. Please post one if you can.

duckbutt:

Good topic for conversation. Have a couple comments and questions. First, what I have done is very similar but my observations are a little different. You may be 1-year ahead of me, maybe more given the difference in climate.

We had an existing 0.1 acre 3-foot deep pond out in the woods, which we expanded to 2 acres. There were small numbers of green sunfish, turtles, crayfish, invertebrates, etc. in the old pond (this was before I found Pond Boss). We did not want to kill off all the critters that were barely scratching out the Michigan winters and allowed them to expand into the new digs, reasoning that they would form the "seed" for predators that we would add later.

The first thing we did was stock 4-6" LMB (75) in order to reduce the GS population. The next year we added a small number of 6-8" channel cats (12), adult BG (50) and RES (25). We also put in large numers of minnows (first two years only) and have always fed the LMB 2x/day. The first two years, We removed a large number of GS in the Spring, which isn't hard to do because of their aggressivenes. All the doom and gloom regarding GS still concerned me.

This is the third year. My LMB and CC were reaching 18" this Spring and the BG spawns were largely unsuccessful so we did not remove any GS this year in order to provide more forage for the growing LMB population (two successful spawns). We also added more adult BG and RES.

I stopped worrying about the GS recalling comments by Bob Lusk indicating that any mature pond will likely have a few GS and that BG will eventually out reproduce GS. In addition, many have indicated that LMB may prefer grazing on GS vs BG due to their lower profile.

We have since found that past BG spawns were apparently more successful than thought (based on the number of 3-4" BG I'm now seeing) and this year should be an explosion. My observations are that there are also a large number of hybrid BG/GS.

The most aggressive fish in the pond are the GS. They feed on pellets when they reach 3" and are aggressive breeders as well. They bed in amongst the BG with the RES usually in separate areas.

Here is my question:

I don't understand how a pond can be dominated by natural hybrids for more than one (maybe a few years). If the hybrids are 70% males with low fecundity, shouldn't the pure strains eventually dominate? Especially with the multiple BG spawning events per year (they are still on the beds).

I'm expecting to see an overall reduction in GS in the next few years. We expect to start removing the intermediate sized BG and any GS caught next year. I expect that a high percentage of the panfish caught will be GS.

Is this reasoning valid?

Here is a pic I hope.

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a356/mchadd/bream3.jpg" alt="" />

I fixed the link for you. Nice!

If you go back to photobucket you can do a 90 degree turn/edit on that.

That is absolutely awesome! I want Dave Willis to see that. If he doesn't post a response I will give the Dr. an email because I don't think you could get a better representation.

Thanks, Duckbutt.

Bruce -- what do you think about that tab (opercular flap) on this fish? It almost seems too big, with a shape reminding me of the longear sunfish?? However, these are MI fish, which should eliminate that "variety" of southern sunfishes.

Here is on caught when the water was clear.

Dave, I thought the tab was HUGE.

No doubt in my mind though, that markings have distinctive redear AND bluegill characteristics. Duckbutt has put up two new photos since your post. The second fish also appears to have an oversized tab, however the third fish's is smaller, but still with redear markings.

Do you think these fish are like GS/BG hybrids and have F1 almost all male progeny?

Bruce -- the "definitive" study on the skewed sex ratio came from a "famous" [in the fisheries world only, of course :-)] study done by W. F. Childers of the Illinois Natural History Survey [Bulletin Volume 29, Article 3, 1967; Hybridization of four species of sunfishes (Centrarchidae)]. He found that 7 of 10 crosses were mostly male, two were near 50-50, and one was predominantly female.

This will probably get long, but I suspect others might be interested in this topic.

Here are the sex ratios (percent male) that he got with various hybrid crosses. The male parent is listed first. When he had more than one trial, I put the number in parentheses following the average.

Redear X Bluegill 97 (3)
Bluegill X Redear 97
Redear X Green 69
Green X Redear 48
Bluegill X Green 97
Green X Bluegill 68 (2)
Redear X Warmouth 55
Bluegill X Warmouth 69 (2)
Green X Warmouth 16
Warmouth X Green 84

A few interesting tidbits, if these percentages are reliable!

As everybody probably knows, these high percentages of males only occur when very "pure" parents are used (no hybridization in their backgrounds).

P.S. Childers also had a few photos in his report. There is a bluegill male X redear female F1 hybrid picture. Guess what, the tab is longer and a little thinner.

All, thanks for the info and intrest in this post.
I really don't know if we are loking at redear male/bluegill female or redear female female /blugill male hybrids. I have caught a few that are almost round, like a big bull bluegill and some that are more redear shaped. The tag on the ear seems pretty constant and grows darker and larger as the fish get bigger. On the younger fish it is easy to see the red on the flap.
Regarding the hybrids being dominate, and replacing the bluegills, thats just my observation and may not be true. These fish are real thick thru the back and are big enough to filet. Lately I've been catching some larger than normal bluegills. Historicaly this pond only produced small bluegill.

I still catch mature and young full blood redears in the pond. Each spring I add around a dozen big male redears and a couple of female redears.

As you can tell I really like redears and I believe they fill a nitch between the blugill and Bass. One of the best things about the hybrids they are easy to catch on a flyrod using popping bugs. I flyfish alot and it's difficult to catch many redears on a floating fly.

To me those fish look like they have some of the features of coppernose bgill. I suspect some coppernose parentage on the bgill side of the family tree for those fish in the above photos.

DB :

Thanks for the pics. The reason I asked for the description is I have some BG/RE crosses also . I have posted on them before as set out below. The ones I have seen and described in these posts
look a little different than yours but not much. They look like your 1st pic. except the ear flap is shorter {50 %} and there is some lavender in the green and silver background color where yours is just green and silver . ewest

http://www.pondboss.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=20;t=001622

http://www.pondboss.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=000214;p=