Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Help Green Sunfish, Hybrid bgills, Bill Cody

B.Morris - Mark McD has pretty much covered all the negatives about green sunfish. I raised them in a cage one time with bgill the same size and some a little smaller. Larger greens ate all the smaller bgill. Greens will get big up to 8" maybe 9", but usu. they get so over abundant that they over eat the food source and do not grow much larger than 5"-6". Many times they only get 3-4" long and become prolific bait stealers. LMB love them and may even eat them in preference to bgill, BUT why grow them in place of or with bgill? Bgill will get larger than greens and bgill will not eat nearly as many small fish as the greens. Many of those small fish will be your young of the year bass; maybe even some of last years bass 2-4". 2-4" bass are not very wide & easy for a larger greeny to swallow.
Some dumb fishermen I know even call greens smallmouth bass; geesh !

With the hybrid bgill in your pond and numerous years of hybrid reproduction the population always seems to revert back to the green sunfish. That's why the reputable hyb. sunfish sellers will tell you to clean out your pond every several years to get rid of this "trash reproduction".

If you always keep a strong, abundant bass population the greens will not become overabundant but will persist at low numbers. As BobL. says greens and hybrids will NOT grow large bass when hybrid are the only forage. Basically bgill are naturally designed to grow large bass by creating lots of proper sized forage. That's why bgill and LMB go good together. But you the PondMeister have to use some brains and manage the pond to maintain proper balance and harvest properly to achieve the desired results. If you leave it up to mother nature she will do it, but probably not to your liking.

Greens as M McD says are hardy. They tolerate real low oxygen levels. Often they are the only ones to survive a fish kill. They are also good jumpers; easily jumping out of a 5 gal bucket half full of water. This ability aids them when migrating up streams to spawn.