Very interesting on what the different lepomis eat. All the scientific names are confusing, but Shawn Banks gives a good overview in this thread.
Shawn Banks has a couple of posts in this thread about RES diet Here is the specific quote from Shawn: I'll break down the table that Ewest pasted. L. macrochirus is the bluegill and L. microlophus is the redear. The real interesting tidbit from this table (Tabel 2- the top table) involves the food items. The taxonomy might confuse you, but everything listed is either an invertebrate or a plant. EXCEPT for the heading Osteichthyes- these are fish. Notice the how many fish were found in the redear's gut? None.
He notes that there were no fish eaten by RES. I also noticed that in general there was very little fish consumption for all the sunfish. Could this be because the BOW's where the studies were done had abundant other forage? I had always heard and thought that BG and other sunfish did a number on small fish fry. Maybe eating fish is only done when more preferred/easier to catch other food is not available.
I was thinking Shorty said his FHM's would disappear at night when put in with his RES. So they surely eat fish under some conditions, but obviously not in that study in that BOW.
