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Snaggy-ass water, but the bluegill were in full color.

I love brim fishing!

Bait?

I was throwing a yellow and black beetlespin.

Just fried up the couple I brought back and made a sandwich. Meant to take a pic but forgot. Brim (sic) fishing makes me feel like a kid.

Those 10" 'gills make a great meal!

I've been catching a few with a chartruse(sp) 1/32 oz. Roadrunner.

Great - but that's not a bluegill. It's a Longear Sunfish. Congrats, because that's a monster for that species!

Description LINK

MOGC, and so do the 8-inchers!

Webster, I like the Roadrunner for ponds but usually toss a beetlespin in any river I don’t know as they’re a little more snag-resistant. Still got hung up 4 out of 5 casts it seemed like. Lost two lures and found two.

Rocky, I’ll defer to your ID. I don’t discriminate between the interbreeding lil tasties. People call these “Redbreasts”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redbreast_sunfish.

Bream, perch, sunfish, bluegill, panfish—I like the chunky ones.

I call'em all bream. Whether Bluegill, Red Ear, Green sunfish...

Back in the '60 AWF introduced a sunfish in Lake Erling that was brown in color. We just called'em government bream.

Bream is the universal Southern moniker for almost any kind of sunfish, I agree. I have no argument, as there are so many species of sunfish, not to mention hybrids, that positive ID can be next to impossible. It can literally come down to counting soft versus hard rays in the dorsal, if you get serious. That one is pretty clearly a longear, though.

Here in the West, we just call most of them sunfish.

I'd never heard of bream until I spent a week in South Carolina. I don't know if they all run that size down there, or we were just fishing a pond with unusually big fish, but we caught lots of them that looked like small dinner plates and probably weighed over a pound each.

I think its a blugillXredbreast. Its absolutly a redbreast cross, the red breast is a give away but the pale blue on the sides is also a give away. Longears have a lot of bright blue spots and that isnt on your fish. A redbreast has a longer ear flap so im thinking it is a bluegill/redbreast cross cause the lack of blue spots and the color of the back is bluegill colored, also the end of the tail is lighter, tjat is a common redbreast trait. Just my opinion but we have all of the sunfish species except the flier where I fish and I almost fish for them exclusively.

Also, it has a bluegill eye. Redbreasts have red eyes.

We call all of them bluegills, even when we have no idea what they are.

Best striper bait that ever swam. These orange bream swam like crazy w/a 7/0 hook thru the lips. Almost a guarnteed bite every time. My brother and I called 'em punkin seed because of the orange color. We knew they were long ears but still called 'em punkin seeds. powdr