Green Sunfish Sexing And Breeding

first off i would like to ask if anyone knows how to sex greensunfish and if anyone has bred them

first off i would like to ask if anyone knows how to sex greensunfish and if anyone has bred them

Bred four pairs last week. Best method for sexing is to gently squeeze fish for gametes. Males (of my populations) tend to be more colorful and lighter in coloration but dimorphism lower than with most sunfishes.

what are gametes?

what are gametes?

Gametes = spew. Semen / sperm will appear milk like (male). Eggs granular like little bits of cream of wheat and usually yellowish to clear (female).

what is the breeding size of greens, what requirements are there for them to breed

what is the breeding size of greens, what requirements are there for them to breed

Simpliest setup for breeding green sunfish is as follows. Optimum temperature range 22 to 27 C and photoperiod with 16 or more hours lights on. Single 3 inch or larger male (I use 4 to 6 inch) in a 20 gallon long or 40 gallon breeder aquarium equipped with a five gallon bucket bottom cut to a depth of 2 inches and filled 2/3 full with pea gravel. Standard filtration applies. Several females usually a little smaller than male can be conditioned in a similar sized tank equipped with a filtration system supporting copious applications of feed. Feed fish to apparent satiation with a varied diet of high quality pellets and live food such as night crawlers (twice daily). Females should really fatten up and male should put on a little more color and possibly dig. After a couple weeks of conditioning tease male by placing a plump female with male for a few minutes. He should dance for her almost immediately. If she is ripe and goes to nest to spawn let her do so, otherwise return her to her conditioning tank. Repeat over next several days. Male should associate you with appearance of food and females and should periodically leave signs of digging in nest or even do it while you watch. Sometimes ripe females will approach front of conditioning tank expecting transfer to tank with male. Eventually a female will be ripe and you will get a spawn. System as described be carefull not to leave female with male too long, he can damage her very quickly. This arrrangment allows maximal control and likelihood of you seeing whole process. You can modify setup allowing less vigelance by transfering multiple females (>5) into tank with male. He will still woop on them but usually less damage to any individual. Down side is possibly nest full of eggs from more than one female (too many to easily raise). Other options with mixed community setting or outdoor tanks/ponds can be used but little control and results more eratic.

will the breeding tank be bare bottom except for the pea gravel in the bucket bottom

will the breeding tank be bare bottom except for the pea gravel in the bucket bottom

The standard protocol used by most hatcheries calls for 4d common nails on the bottom, about 1 lb/gallon. Make sure you get common/bright nails, not cement coated ones, as the glue will dissolve in the water and poison the fish. Over time, the nails develop a natural brown patina which resembles pebbles or mud. Fishes will not pursue eggs into the nails to eat them and therefore the hatch rate is higher. If you are really industrious you can stand the nails on end, but this takes a lot of time and the fish usually just knock them over. Some hobbyists have figured out that if you get some of that plastic needlepoint mesh (I don't know what it's called) you can poke the nails through the mesh and the fish can't knock them over. This takes even MORE time, but you only have to do it once. Personally I would just throw them in there - they seem to work just as well.

Whatever method you decide upon, let us know how it turns out!

will the breeding tank be bare bottom except for the pea gravel in the bucket bottom

I usually use bare bottom tanks since they are easier to clean but a planted tank with gravel works just fine. Gravel bottom enables better natural filtration to supplement what ever other water quality mangement methods you may be using. Male sunfishes seem to prefer round depressions in which to make nest, and a courting male has little trouble luring the female to his crib. The pre-fabricated nest provides a good round depression and enables you to move the entire brood to another tank with minimal disturbance so you can meet needs of the larvae without interference from dad.

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I usually use bare bottom tanks since they are easier to clean but a planted tank with gravel works just fine. Gravel bottom enables better natural filtration to supplement what ever other water quality mangement methods you may be using. Male sunfishes seem to prefer round depressions in which to make nest, and a courting male has little trouble luring the female to his crib. The pre-fabricated nest provides a good round depression and enables you to move the entire brood to another tank with minimal disturbance so you can meet needs of the larvae without interference from dad.

Cmj15,

If you are to the point of sexing fish, then I recommend you check out a text book on fish hatchery management or aquaculture. Details could be found concerning how to mannually express gametes. Sexing fish can be easy with minimal practice. I have my students (grade school, high school and college) do it all the time and accuracy typically very high. Just mixing gametes as suggested by Mscooter will yeild very low success at best since the eggs of a given female are at the proper stage of ripeness only a small portion of the time. If you went the manual mixing route you would have yoy (young-of-year = fish born since January of this calendar year) fish within 36 h and little green sunfish larvae about 5 days later. Really cool to watch development under a dissecting microscope that you might be able to check out from your high school.

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Drat, I missed out.

Does the pectoral fin color have anything to do with it? I caught 4 green sunnies at West Point Lake last weekend and only one had bright orange fins. The others all had white on them, and that's it. I also caught some ripe females and they didn't have the orange on their pectoral fins like the one did, so I was just guessing it was a male.

Does the pectoral fin color have anything to do with it? I caught 4 green sunnies at West Point Lake last weekend and only one had bright orange fins. The others all had white on them, and that's it. I also caught some ripe females and they didn't have the orange on their pectoral fins like the one did, so I was just guessing it was a male.

In my experience all sunfishes normally have clear pectoral fins unless damaged by infection or something like a leech. Usually white, yellow, orange and sometimes even red is restricted to dorsal and anal finswith some on pelvic fins and even points of caudal fin with exceptional individuals. I have been catching green sunfish from all over and coloration can vary by sex and season more than by where they are acquired from. Males do tend to show more of the yellow-orange-red coloration especially when critters like scuds and aquatic pill bugs are impotant parts of diet. Females can also color up but takes longer I think owing to thier putting dietary pigments (those imparting colors you mention) into storage for egg production. Prettiest greens I have seen are out side the breeding season in small streams where the darters also put on lots of strong reds, oranges and yellows. For some reason I can not match through diet modification the coloration of wild greens, evidently more than simply pigments in diet.