Hi John-
I just signed up for the forum and came across this post. Some quick background on me, I'm 34, grew up obsessed with fishing, and was fortunate that both neighborhoods I lived in until heading out to college had large numbers of green sunfish. The one I lived next to from 8 to 18 had nothing but green sunfish and white suckers in it when it was originally built. So for a good 5 years 98% of fish I caught were nothing but green sunfish. They apparently were living in the small creek that existed prior to the water retention pond being constructed.
The last four years I was fishing regularly bluegills were stocked into our previously GSF only pond. In that time I caught only one naturally occuring hybrid out of literally thousands and I was pretty excited to catch something I viewed as exotic.
Bowhunting took a priority when I got my driver's license as the fishing in my part of Iowa was not the best at that time so up until this June I was out of the fishing world.
Anyway when I started fishing again this year one of my goals was to catch as many of the Iowa species as I possibly could and I included the HBG in my checklist. I eventually found a pond that had been stocked with a large # of HBG (it also produced a 9 inch BG which was rather cool by itself!).
Anyway this HBG I caught was 9.5 inches. I also included a picture of the IGFA World Record GSH which was 2-2. I personally am fond of the GSH because I have caught more of them in my lifetime than anything else and it seems like the one species Iowa has a chance to score a world record. Iowa has a state record of 2-1 so it seems obtainable....
Until I saw your post about the 2-5 kansas state record! Kind of an interesting record keeping discrepancy it seems!
Anyway I can say with a good degree of certainty that the three fish you have pictured are all pure GSF as I have seen a million of them. Granted I'm still very much learning but it is something I have a large amount of field experience with.
I will definitely be interested to hear what your GSF growth rates are like as I'm thinking about trying to grow a world record in one of my family ponds if you don't beat me to it!
Hope I did alright with my first post!
http://wrec.igfa.org/WRecordsList.aspx?lc=AllTackle&cn=Sunfish,%20green
