Hello,
Last year in early June I stocked about 50 SFS, they were about evenly mixed male and female and were 4-5" long each. The males were coloring up and getting ready to spawn. I had about 5 crevice devices placed around the pond but could not witness any clustering of shiners around the spawning devices. 2 of the devices were stacks of CDs and were stacks of plastic cardboard squares.
This spring I removed the spawning structure, inspected, powerwashed and will be putting back in when water temps arm up again. I noted no egg residue on the black plastic sheets of plastic cardboard, but the CD stacks had sticky egg residue left in the cracks here and there. I surely am hoping to see young SFS but the question is how do I recognize them?
I think someone said once that from the top the GSH and SFS can be differentiated by the color of their top side? How does that go again?
My GSH have been in the pond for 3 years and there are scads of them. Today I easily got a couple dozen shiners in a trap and took a picture. I thought the more silvery looking ones might be SFS but I think they are just younger GSH that have not shown the golden hue yet.
Will the SFS have the spot on the fin even when 1-2" long or does that spot come only with maturity? Other ways to spot a successful group of YOY SFS?
Maybe there just was only a few successful YOY and they will blend in with my schools of GSH and can't tell them apart?
I know now that the big splashes that come when I feed the fish are the YP taking aim at a cloud of feeding GSH at the top and ambushing them from underneath. I suspected that but wasn't sure. But tonight the kids took the GSH from the trap, baited their hooks with them and could not believe how aggressively the YP smashed the live shiners.
Before they always caught the YP on pieces of corn or bits of worm and they had to work a bit to catch one. With the live shiner it is like hold on for dear life as they smashed them.
There are scads of GSH for the YP so hopefully they will continue to keep their bellies full. It might be time to get some HSB or SMB to help keep the GSH in check after their 2-3 year headstart!
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SFS structure
Shiners from the top view (all look dark on the top side to me):
all look to be GSH to me.
Does someone have pictures of the top view of their schools of SFS or a picture of various sizes in a trap or laid out like mine? I can only find internet pictures of single adults and mostly they are 'optimized' paintings or illustrations of SFS.