Caught a few dozen of these out of my pond today. Just wondering what species they are exactly..

Growing up we called everything a perch..


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https://www.texasfreshwaterflyfishing.com/p/texas-sunfish-identification-guide.html?m=1

Closest thing I could find

Very young red ear sunfish is my guess.

Young bluegill. And if I was a betting man, I’d bet your pond is muddy water???

Thats what I was thinking Catperch. no sunlight to bring out its natural colors.

It fluctuates a little but most of the time it’s muddy..

Here is another one..

That’s a green sunfish.

Yea, muddy water will produce a lighter color fish. I have caught perch in the Sabine for bait that are shiny white with no color….. this fish talk and hot weather makes me wonder why I’m going to the deer stand instead of the river!

The top one is a bluegill that needs sunlight. The 2nd on is a green sunfish. Look at the difference in the shape and size of their mouths.

What’s interesting about this pond is that back in late August I had huge fish kill and thought I had lost all my fish. I haven’t fished it since but today I caught a 10 inch crappie, a few carp, polywogs and a lot of these sunfish. All on worms

I knew the polywogs/bullheads lived, had no idea carp were in there. I thought all the baitfish had died.

I netted hundreds of gizzard shad, bass, crappie and catfish out when it died.

My plan is to back in early spring and stock channels and bluegills.

If you don’t have bass in a tank the bluegill will overpopulate and stunt. If I wanted a catfish/perch pond I’d kill all fish with Rotenone and start over with catfish, hybrid bluegill and redears. They won’t reproduce too fast and the catfish can manage their numbers. Read up on it before stocking the tank.

This is EXACTLY what we stocked with but we also put in hybrid crappie

What is a hybrid crappie?

White Black cross.

Cross between a black crappie and a white crappie. They don’t reproduce very well and grow faster and larger than a non hybrid.

Exactly ☝️…we stocked back in February of this year. All were fingerlings and the channel cat are now 2.5lbs