Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Fly Fishing & Other Fish Species Is this a FHM?

I caught this thing on the Chipola River this past week. Is it a FHM?

Or a spottail shiner?

I'm guessing it is not a fathead.

It appears to be a blacktail shiner -- or some kind of shiner.

Blacktail Shiner

Ken got it right, it's a blacktail shiner. It may actually be a good pond forage fish...

Rarely if ever will you ever see FHM in open bodies of water where there are predators in the wild. They are not adapted to live in circumstances like that. They are adapted to living in harsh dried up pools in rivers and creeks in the Midwest where other game fish cannot survive.

Notropis hudsonius and Cyprinella venusta look the same to my novice eyes. What source would one use to decipher the difference between the two? I'm going to go back to the location with a seine and take some better pictures.

You shouldn't catch any spottail shiner (N.hudsonius) in northern FL. Shiners with spots on the tail in northern FL should all be the blacktail shiner - C.venusta. Body or morphological differences between the spottail and blacktail are slight. The blacktail has fine dark speckles on the membranes between the rays of the dorsal fin whereas those membranes of the spottail are clear. In the blacktail shiner distance from the front of the dorsal fin to tail spot is shorter than the distance from front of dorsal fin to tip of snout. Opposite is true for the spottail shiner. Generally the tail spot on the adult blacktails is more rectangular whereas it is shaped more like a triangular spot for the spottails.

Blacktail shiner are said to be crevice spawners which means as CJ said, they should spawn in a pond if given the proper spawning habitat. If you are able to catch some, then Private Message (PM) me for ideas for making spawning devices for the blacktails in your pond.

I'm starting to think they are the same fish. Check out the ranges on the two links below. Where one stops, the other begins.

Blacktail

Spottail

Definitely not the same fish, not even the same Genus but closely related. Previously they were in the same genus (1989 Mayden). Several taxonomic technical things / features separate these two species. Snout tip is definitely different on both species and each one spawns differently, plus the items I noted above. However they probably fill a very similar niche in each geographic range.

I can assure you, if you held both fish in your hand they would look very different. Not all regions are like this, but many times large adult spottail shiners do not even have a spot on their tail. These are the ones that are a real nightmare to ID compared to eastern silvery minnows which is another closely related species. It's been my experiences that spottail shiners hug the bottom of their habitat. Whereas blacktail shiners and other closely related species like spotfin or satinfin shiners are more of a mid water to surface species.

You guys are good. Real good.

I still plan on seining some this weekend. Think dumping the harvest in my pond is a bad idea from a disease xfer prospective? I expect they'd die from predation or poor water quality in a matter of hours but at the slight chance they survived, it'd be worth the trouble for the potential gain in bio diversity.

There is always that risk when transferring wild fish to your pond that you can bring in disease, parasites, etc... There are things you can do to limit that. It can be a lot of work though.

What species and sizes are already present in the pond? If you want the blacktails to spawn, you need to construct spawning devices as ponds generally do not naturally have the correct spawning areas for species like the blacktail.

On second thought, it's not worth it. I'll just get some Golden Shiners from a hatchery.

The pond currently has LMB, CNBG, WM and gambusia. See link bellow:

Daffin's Lake

If you have established LMB, I would look at getting the largest GSH you can find...

Thanks for the advice. I'll see what I can do.