Ewest -- water clarity is relatively high within the lake, and within the plant beds. It does get some algae, but it's mostly green algae, not the pea-soup blue-green blooms we get on some of the more productive lakes. We've never taken a look at GSF cuckolds. Probably need to do that!
Norm -- I can't answer such hard questions!
I honestly don't know how we would see/measure hybrid depression. I would expect "hybrid vigor" in the f1 generation, but who knows what percentage of the parentals are actually pure. The last time up there, I grabbed what appeared to be a parental male bluegill to show a student the long gill rakers, and it had short stubby rakers (i.e., green sunfish gill rakers!). As a result, I really can't tell how much reproduction comes from supposed parentals and how much from the hybrid swarm. This lake has had the hybrids for decades.
Interestingly, we've seen an increase in quality of the sunfish in recent years. The largemouth bass density has gradually increased (in fact, their growth has slowed and their average size is down; just like a pond!) over the last decade, and the size of the sunfish has increased. We now occasionally see a parental male bluegill of 8 inches, which never happened in the past.
