Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Sunfish-Including Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass need help w/ ID please

caught this one today. wondering whether this was some kind of hybrid RES X BG cross or if it's just a RES w/ a poorly defined border around its "ear". i am trying to learn as much as i can about the panfish in the pond and its turning into an obsession of sorts. i never thought i'd care this much about gills and crackers.

from the "never, EVER thought this would happen" file: today there was a 6 pound bass spawning on one side of the pond. another at least 8 spawning on the other. and all i cared about was fishing that big BG bed in front of me. i used to group all panfish into one category - "bass food". now i can't get enough of these awesome little fish and i'm trying to learn as much as i can about 'em.

thanks in advance for your help.

In my opinion it looks like a gill-cracker hybrid.

Yep, it's a gillcracker. And a nice one at that! Caught one today myself.

thanks guys! i was really hoping it was a cross. for some reason, i just think that's incredibly cool. probably because this is the first one i've ever seen in person.

is having these a good thing, bad thing, or no big deal either way?

Good thing in my book... they grow large, still retain the pharyngeal plate to crush snails with, readily take pelleted feed, are 97% male, and fight like the devil on light tackle.

Great fish to have in your pond.

If you're trying to grow big bass, they're bad. But, if you're becoming more interested in fishing for sunfish, they're an awesome hybrid.

I also am interested in the BG and RES and appreciate the ID so I can learn also. I have one pond that has 125 3" RES stocked last fall and only 10 5" BG. I'm hoping I get some hybrids from that pond. Don't know why I want them, for the novelty I guess.

Wife and I caught a few BG today. They are only 6" + or - because we have just had them in the pond about a year since they were fingerlings. But she commented how nice of a fight they put up. I told her imagine what it will be like when they are a couple inches longer and twice the weight they are now.

Looking forward to it.

Jignpig that looks like it has some PS genes.

Confirmed PS X BG

thanks again guys. here's 3 good ones from today:

first a real nice bull gill. he even had a tiny little helmet.



then another one of those crazy hybrids (or at least i think it is). if so, this is 2 in 2 days. i might have a pond full of these things and i didn't even know it.



and finally, a crappie-sized shell cracker. i was real proud of this one. no ruler handy so i went and got some paper. this one gave me such a tussle, i honestly thought for a minute that i had a bass on that ultralight. real cool colors too.



i can see now how these fish can cross so easily. all were caught out of the same bed

Are these the gill rakers of a crappie or a RES?

Crappie or RES????

I posted this dead fish I found over in another thread and two experts thought it looked like crappie. Here is the other thread for those interested.

I've found pictures of BG gill rakers but having trouble with the crappie and RES. Find descriptions but no pictures.

I'd like some more opinions.

Not that I distrust Esshup's and sprkplus's expert opinions, just that I live only 4 miles from Missouri and some of the show-me rubbed off.

Is there a good web site that has detailed pictures of the gills of all of the pond fish we are interested in? All in one place?

Don't insult Esshup by listing me in the expert category alongside him. I'm about as far removed from that description as it's possible to get.

What I saw in your photos that said crappie to me, was the general coloration, the yellow eye color, and the fact that the markings continued up onto what was left of the tail and fins.

snrub - the first gill arch of a crappie has rakers as long as or longer than the gill filaments. Thus the fish in your linked photo 'Crappie or RES' is definitely not a crappie.

Somewhere in the archives is a chart describing sunfish gill rakers, if I remember right RES have "short" gill rakers. I think it is in one of the HBG threads.

Found it.

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=14459&page=7

Here are all of Snrub's photos together....if I understand correctly, these are all of the same fish.

Here is one on my RES, I will throw this in simply because I like this picture.

Due to the condition of snrub's dead fish I really don't have an opinion as to what it is, but it could possibly be a RES.

This is what I see:

Tony, I'm with you. Coloring, eye and sharp ear tab.

Someone, anyone, catch a crappie and or a RES and take a picture of the first gill arch. That will help a lot with this debate. Numerous members here have RES and quite a few have crappie,,,,, go fishing, take your camera, and sacrifice one for the debate.

I just can't move past the eye coloration, and the markings on the base of the caudal fin (as well as the anal and dorsal, to a lesser degree), on Snrub's fish. I have never seen a RES with yellow eyes, or those kinds of markings on it's fins. But I've seen many crappies thus equipped. I also struggle somewhat with the idea of a non-feed trained RES in a Kansas pond, gaining six inches in length in a year's time. I'm sure it's possible under ideal conditions, but that surely must be exceptional growth for a farm pond.


I can barely tell a gill rake from a hay rake, so I gladly yield to Bill's unquestioned expertise ....very curious fish. To me anyway.

No, you are not as far from that description as it's possible to get, because you are a thousand times closer to it than I am. You have obviously done a lot of fishing and looked at a lot of fish. I have looked at a lot of fish but they have been ocean fish and looking at them under the water, not at the end of a fillet knife. Till about a year and a half ago I didn't give squat about a RES or BCP or LMB or BG or FHM nor would I have even recognized those acronyms. So I value your judgment when it comes to pond fish ID.

I keep thinking about the fish that highflyer had a picture of from his Texas get together. We all stood around and watched as he sorted out BCP into the "bait" bucket to be destroyed and in went a fish with a red ear tab. (OK, FireIsHot did some work, the rest of us just gawked). We all looked at it and highflyer exclaimed a BCP/RES cross, and threw it in with the rest of the "trash" to be taken out of the pond. Well that is what it looked like for sure laying there amongst all the other BCP that was in that container (although I had never heard or read of such a cross nor had others). We thought we had something of a "special" fish that highflyer did not want as his breeding stock in his pond, and took a little ribbing from the post thinking it was a cross that could not happen. But it sure did, from visual indications only, look like a BCP with a red opercular tab. Likely, in retrospect, highflyer threw away a perfectly good pure RES.

Also look at some of the recent posting of catches of RES. Look at the upside down fish of Jignpig's above earlier in this thread. Don't they visually look like some BCP markings? They do to me, but I have not looked at that many BCP so don't trust my own interpretation of visual indications. It seems like to me the RES can be all over the place in the visual markings category with some having the vertical bars like BG, others not, etc. But then I have simply not had that much experience with even visual id's on pond fish., so I defer to others that have.

I just keep coming back to what I read about BCP having long gill rakers.

Esshup,

I do not disagree at all with the visuals.

I just keep coming back to those gill rakers. I have searched for pictures of BCP gill rakers and could find none. I have read descriptions, but having filleted few fish and looked at fewer gill rakers, my frame of reference comparison is poor to say the least. What is "long" and what is "short" is very subjective when I have looked at very few gill rakers.

The only reason I even questioned it is because in my strange interest I've taken in RES for what reason I have no idea, the short gill raker description of the RES from my Internet "book learning" popped into my mind when I saw the mangled fish.

Wish I had more presence of mind to have taken better pictures. Carolynn happened to be with me and I had her take the first picture of the gills with her phone. At that time the fish was still pretty fresh (likely a fresh kill early that morning) and had I thought could have spread the fins out and taken good ID pictures. But I did not think of taking more pictures till late in the day. I had thrown the fish up on the bank and it was sundown when I went back and snapped a couple more pictures with my phone, which takes much poorer pictures and the light of day was almost gone. Why do I think of this stuff after it is already too late?

They are all pictures of the same fish.

Thank you Shorty.

That is a good chart that I had not seen. My problem, having not been a dedicated angler all my life and not fished that much, is I have a poor frame of reference for comparisons. I just have not seen that many gill rakers, so I did quite a number of Internet searches trying to come up with BCP and RES gill pictures and came up empty handed. Quite a few of really good ones on BG, but nothing on crappie.

My fish gill rakers looked "short" to me, but I had no frame of reference to compare them to.

Thank you Bill Cody!

That is what my vast inexperience keeps bringing me back to.

I had what looked like a BCP, but I did not want it to be a BCP and those gill rakers did not meet the description as I imagined it of a BCP.

I did not want it to be a BCP because I had not stocked BCP and did not particularly want BCP in my pond (at least not in a number that would spawn big numbers of them and ruin the pond - have nothing against the fish personally .

So what might seem like a pointless debate to some, to me is somewhat important for my own peace of mind.

My BG and the original small percentage of RES were stocked a year ago March (2013). If that fish is a BCP, an off species fish escaped the stocking ID culling process. If it is a RES, I'm pretty proud of a 9" RES when the largest BG to date that has been caught from the pond might measure 7". In other words, all the gazillion snails around my disgusting FA might be a pretty good environment to raise RES and I might have a few more of the nice sized fish (for its age)just like it in my pond. In other words, it gives me hope I'm doing something right. Or at least the fish are doing something right.

I did not have a tape measure with me, but my hand from thumb to pinkie when streched out spans 9", and that is what that fish was.

So that is why I brought the subject up again to see if we could come to a conclusion. Or at least a conclusion that was more to my liking.

Wisconsin Fish has a large data base with excellent pics of positively ided fish with gill raker pics.

See this link from the archives on fish id sites

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92461#Post92461