<< Green sunfish you can't go wrong with. they are easy to feed , they eat
anything, and spawn at a small size. I have never spawned pumpkinseed in
an aquarium , they are so common here that they just didnt seem worth the
effort. My green sunfish spawning was accidental. I had a melanistic male
( his fins and flanks were black specked so much he was solid black in the
middle area of his sides) and a female I caught later on that I seen to be
gravid. Greens are sometimes hard to sex. Pumpkinseeds are easy to sex in
the spring. the males oranges and blues get real intense, but females stay
a pale color. the males ear will be larger for that sized fish, and the
red tip on the ear seems alot more prominent. It is just a matter with
these two species to a catch alot of them at pre spawn, and compare them to
one another. Orange spots and Northern Longears are easy to sex when full
grown, which luckily isnt very big. >>
Here the green sunfish are more common than pumpkinseeds; in the three
locations I've caught green sunfish I've only caught pumpkinseeds at one of
them. I've never seen any melanistic greens, the only two differences I
noticed are the greens are either a dull olive green or a darker shade of
green, almost a forest green. Some of the young are purple-colored; I believe
this a juvenile coloration.
I love pumpkinseeds; the ones here are orange-bellied with darkish bars
down the side with orange spots, they have a background green color with an
overlaying yellow color which manifests itself when the fish is excited or
has been fed a lot of food containing carotenoids. The fins are sort of a
glowy irridescent blue and the base of the fins is orange with a
checkerboard-style mottling pattern. They also have the black bar through
the eyes and the irridescent blue way lines which look like warpaint with
orange in between them on the cheeks. Do the pumpkinseeds from your area look
anything like that? I'm just kind of wondering how much they would vary from
WI to MI.
What are Northern longears supposed to look like?
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