Bluegill or Redbreast?

How do you distinguish between the two? I catch large bream with the blue flap on the gill, but they have a bright red breast, but don't have the extended flap like most of the redbreast illustrations I see. Are these bluegills?

Sounds like bluegills to me. The shorter flap on the gill cover is the key. This might help:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...3D10%26hl%3Den

I have a hard time w/ this too. They're easily identifed when I fish at this little lake, but I've been catching a lot on the river that have the extended gill cover w/ no trace or shade of red. Only green and turquoise.

I feel really dumb considering I did lab morphometrics work on silversides in college.

If they pull like a freight train, then they are a bluegill! :D

This site has pixs of both.

http://www.outdooralabama.com/fishin...er/fish/bream/

See this link:

Bluegill

The easiest way for me to tell if it is a Bluegill or not is the black spot at the base of the posterior portion of the dorsal fin. If the bream does not have that spot or the black spot on the gill cover, then it must be some other kind of bream.

This is a little off topic, but I caught a fish the other day that was definitely a bream, but it looked almost like a bluegill with spots like a crappie and it was a greenish color. Would this be a spotted sunfish? All the pictures I've found of spotted sunfish don't look a lot like the one I caught, but I can't figure out what else it could be. It's spots were a lot more pronounced than any of the pictures I found and it was much greener.

a female redear /shellcracker will have "specks" or spots like a crappie , especially during or around the spawn - i have caught several that i thought were hybrids between the 2 species but later found out that it's just the characteristics of the female redear.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by erichkopp

Would this be a spotted sunfish?

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See this link:

Stumpknocker (aka Spotted Sunfish)

The Stumpknockers I have caught all look just like the one in the link above. They are usually small about five or six inches long.

i dont know

dixieangler, it looked sort of like that, but it had no red at all. It was just shades of green and some white. I already searched the FF&W website and didn't find anything that looked like it could be what I caught. It's got me stumped.

erichkopp,

Might be a hybrid of some sort that would not necessarily be a particular kind. Hybrid fish may have traits of different kinds of particular bream. Did you look up a Flier to see if that was it? A Flier has a dark vertical streak below the eye. I have caught these before also, just not very often.

Flier

Yep, I looked that up too. It must have been some sort of hybrid. I wish I'd got a picture because it looked really cool.

I don’t think it’s unusual for the female shelcrackers to not show any red. They are also often lighter colored with more of a yellowish tint.