I've been skipping my usual Delaware-Raritan Canal trips at lunchtime and going to the Delaware river instead.I've been catching a great variety of fish from the river plus as a bonus the canal runs very close to the river where I am so I've gotten more shrimp out of one small area then from all of my previous sampling in other parts of the canal. I have some pictures that I'll post later including pictures of a minnow\shiner that I need identified. My camera phone decided to change a focus setting on itself costing me good pictures of an absolutely beautiful baby Green Sunfish. what I have instead is a blurry tease photo in that you can see how beautiful the fish is but the blurriness rob of the fine detail that would make the picture pop.

In no particular order here are the fish I've caught so far.

Green Sunfish
Bluegill Sunfish
Freshwater shrimp(not sure of the species)
Spiny Cheeked Crayfish(O.limosus)
Virile Crayfish(O.virilis)
American Eel
Darter(not sure either Tessellated or Shield)
Unknown minnow or shiner.
Brown Bullhead
Eastern Blacknosed Dace
Really really small yoy minnows, I'll have to wait until they get a little bigger to post pics for an id.

What I love is that last week I was dragging my small dipnet through some puddles last week catching the crayfish and super small minnows and then after the heavy rain came through I was dragging my net through some flooded grass catching the larger unknown minnows and the baby eel. Either high water or low the same little area maybe 50 feet long yielded this kind of numbers and variety.

More of the same today. I caught a few more of the unknown minnows from the river and shrimp and yoy sunfish from the canal. I know promised pictures but I didn't upload them to Photobucket until late last night and then when I posted them here I was told I had too many pictures in the post. I'll have to break it apart into multiple posts when I get home tonight Photobucket is blocked here at work.

Here are the 2 mystery fish, I know one is a darter I'm just not sure if it's a Tessellated or Shield darter.









Here are some inverts. The shrimp are from the canel, the crayfish is from the river. The crayfish btw is a master of digging. I've seen crayfish do some serious excavating but this guy is taking it to new levels. He's digging under all of the rocks on one side of the tank. I just hope he doesn't cause a cave-in. As a bonus check out the little sunfish with the shrimp. Blackbanded I think

Edited by davidjh2, 05 October 2010 - 07:46 PM.