young lepomis care

Those adult fish look excellent Uland. It is tough to get those kind of shots but I think those are pretty nice. It looks to me like those guys lean more toward miniatus in coloration than punctatus. I always find it amazing how much and how quickly spawning sunfish can change colors, especially females, they get so dark for such a breif moment.

Thanks Brian, they came from the extreme western edge of the published integrade zone so yeah...not sure how much punctatus I see in them but when in normal coloration they look a bit different. I dunno, I have no real experience with punctatus to be honest.
The color changes right at spawn are really dramatic and I feel lucky to have been able to see it over the last couple of years and manage to take any photos this year.

About how old are those fish? They look very healthy.

The fish are almost three years old. The male has always been a great specimen but he really damages the other fish in the tank before spawning. The bottom of the tank is littered with so many subordinate fish scales, they clog the turkey baster when I try to remove the young. One thing that I'm never happy with is coloration. I can never seem to get the vivid colors I see in the wild despite the complexity of feed.

You know something that I've been pondering as of late could provide even further information to something like this, BAP, AC article or otherwise. We use HOBO temperature loggers to record stream temperature every year at about 200 locations. Naturally there is some attrition, broken, disappear, or lost, but there is also a subset we no longer use because they are out of our acceptable QC range, i.e. fluctuate > 0.2 C. I have no clue what we do with them, but loaning them to those outside our program has occured in the past. I personally proposed putting them in some natural and artificial systems to get spawning and early life history development temp data. This is a great example of where some useful information (spawning temp, temp/time egg development, fry development, etc.) could be documented from Uland's breeding tank. Sorry to derail slightly.

I came into work and see a new hatch. This makes three batches. At least three that I have noticed.

In my experience with Lepomis species all you have to do is keep them well fed and the temperature in the mid 70's and they will spawn about once a week for as long as the conditions are kept this way.