Green sunfish, two interesting fish and questions

The first one is the belly on this tiny little sunfish. Are those eggs or is he/she a heavy eater?

The second one is a mouth hooked fish. It started "oozing" (regurgitating). Are those eggs being regurgitated or just something that was really well digested? I've never cleaned a greenie, so I don't know how small their eggs are.

The panfish magnet didn't survive :). I had the head superglued on, but after a few fish, the back of the plastic had been pulled free from the hook (torn through the side still attached to the head of the bait). Finally, something pulled the whole thing off the jighead.

Interesting for sure, I don't know.

No, those are not eggs. I am not an ichthyologist or an expert, but I believe a fish or any animal cannot regurgitate it's eggs. The gonads/ovaries are not connected to the stomach.

I’ve caught a few that had that huge gut. I always assumed it was packed with eggs as the fish looked healthy and put up a good fight. Don’t know about that second one. Maybe someone will know.
Bob

Sound like a fun day of catchn..... That 1st one looks to be about to pop.....LOL

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Originally Posted by Perris Blue

No, those are not eggs. I am not an ichthyologist or an expert, but I believe a fish or any animal cannot regurgitate it's eggs. The gonads/ovaries are not connected to the stomach.

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I was referring to whether said fish had feasted on eggs from another fish, not whether it was puking it's own eggs. Sorry for the confusion.

I found this interesting... a fish farm saying that green sunfish will ruin a pond. http://www.suttlefish.com/Green%20sunfish.html

Another site says that they reach sexual maturity at 2-3 inches, so I guess that fish technically could have been full of eggs. I didn't think it was big enough to spawn.

greensunfish in at least one case i know of factually can save a pond . i know a fair sized pond of about 3 acres flat full of them and i am pretty sure they are what keeps the white crappie in there from overpopulating and then you get fish like my avatar fish that survive the onslaught and grow to tremendous proportions .
green sunfish are mega sunfish in how aggressive they are and i would tend to think fish one is full of eggs and fish 2 i am not sure what its spitting up .
i have seen 4 inch crappie dripping eggs before and got a bluegill just they other day that maybe 3 inches and decided to cut it up and low and behold it was full of eggs .

p.s. the second fish is actually a hybrid , not a pure green

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Originally Posted by Ketchn

p.s. the second fish is actually a hybrid , not a pure green

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What gives it away? Is it the orange breast or something else?

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Originally Posted by Schmoopie

What gives it away? Is it the orange breast or something else?

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Not “heady” enough ,mouth is small and body build is wrong to start with

The left one, the greenie, may have been both full of eggs and been feeding heavily. With the little gluttons it might have been both. FWIW if the temp stays right and the food does, too, a pair of green sunfish can spawn every ten days or so year around. For that matter bluegills often respawn, too. Even here in Minneapolis, I have seen beds active from the end of May into just about the end of August. Not every year though.
The other doesn't look to me like a greenie hybrid. Most of those I've seen inherit the greenie, outsized mouth. Almost certainly a bluegill was one of the parents and the other could have been just about any of the other sunfish species. Very few places that have sunfish have only a single species; so there are nearly always some hybrids of one sort or another. Of course there are also quite a few different types of true bluegill too, but the margin on the tab speaks against that.

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Originally Posted by Ketchn

Not “heady” enough ,mouth is small and body build is wrong to start with

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The mouth looks like a bluegill in the photo, but I don't remember him to have as small of a mouth as it looks. Then again, I likely wasn't paying attention. This is a small creek and almost everything I catch has the green sunfish orange fins. I've caught a few bluegills, but I fish rocks mostly and those green sunfish love to hide in rocks (as do bluegill in ponds, but there aren't that many bluegills in this creek). The creek has several rock "dams" in it which fish can get through, but it's really mostly storm sewer drainage. At "normal" level, there are pools and nothing over 3-4' deep and maybe 6' wide. I'm fishing at the upper end of the creek. The creek empties into a river a few miles away and that river dumps into the Mississippi River probably 8 miles from there. Most fish don't travel up that far, though I've caught the occasional bluegill and bass, and have heard of others catching the occasional catfish. The fish are stunted because there are more fish in these pools than it can sustain until the runoff from streets and lawns occurs. My point is that the body shape may be an effect of the stunting, but there's also no reason why bluegill getting trapped up there during spawn wouldn't spawn there too (and create hybrids).

The little green gluttons are so highly adaptable. They can also show a more rounded sunfish like body shape. It is certainly true that tiny waters also have smaller fish, and finding greenies hiding in the rocks in sometimes only inches of water is also common enough. The greens are present in such a wide range that there are almost certainly multiple strains, and they are used as bait in many places; so strains may well get moved around.