Re: NANFA-L-- New member, identification help.

Peter Unmack (peter.lists at)
Sun, 23 Apr 2006 19:52:43 -0500 (CDT)

On Sun, 23 Apr 2006, Dan Johnson wrote:

> I've read through the archives many times, but this is my first post.
> I've been collecting fish in the Houston, TX area now for a couple of
> years. I'm having some identification problems and thought I'd tap the
> expertice of the group. If you go to www.io.com/~danjohns/fish, you'll
> find four photos of things I can't identify. There's a sunfish and a
> minnow collected in freshwater and two killifish collected in
> brackish/salt water. Are saltwater fish and acceptable topic for this
> list? Thanks in advance for the identification help.

We don't talk about salt water stuff too often, but the odd digression
will be readily tolerated. :-) So don't worry about it.

The minnow is a Notemigonus crysoleucas (golden shiner) which is probably
a bait bucket release as they are commonly used as fishing bait.

The second killifish might be Adinia xenica (diamond killifish). I have
no idea which species of Fundulus that is, but it should be easy for
someone who knows the group as that dark spot on the dorsal fin is pretty
distinctive.

The sunfish is really washed out, but looks likely to be a Lepomis
microlophus (redear sunfish) based on the red on the edge of the "ear"
(see
http://www.utexas.edu/tmm/tnhc/fish/na/centrarc/lepomis_/lmicrolo/lmicrol1.jpg
for another pic)

A good site for figuring out Texas fishes is the Texas Natural History
Collection website which has a list of Texas fishes with many links.
http://www.utexas.edu/tmm/tnhc/fish/na/txindex.html You can then use
Google to look for pictures of various species and-in-least narrow things
down.

Cheers
Peter
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