Quote Originally Posted by LedHed View Post
Looks like the hard work is paying off! Excellent fish. Need to get some GS hybrids Walt - they are insane....
I have worked with hybrid bluegill in the past, Sonny, and have done some reading on them as well. Believe it or not, even northern-strain bluegill outgrow them, significantly, after the first couple months of life. There was a study done in Missouri by Hayward and Wang, published in 2003, that found that the bluegill-green sunfish hybrids outgrew the pure northern-strain bluegill for the first thirty days, but after that the northern-strain nearly doubled the growth rate of the hybrids.

And there have been multiple studies that have found coppernose to significantly outgrow northern-strain bluegill in warm climates. That's consistent with my experience also.

The 2.08-pounder from yesterday came from a two-acre pond that only had northern-strain bluegill up until two years ago when I stocked 100 coppernose in the 8-10" range from another pond. The biggest northern-strain that has been caught from that pond probably weighed twenty-four ounces, if that.

I manage a seven-acre pond in west Tennessee that has only been stocked for a little over two years; it only has coppernose, and they were 1" long when I stocked them in March 2016. The owner caught a 10.75" coppernose back in March; that fish still has three and a half or more years to grow. (The average lifespan of a bluegill in the south is six years.)