Capturing the Beauty and Distinction of the Northern Sunfish

Glen Gorman emailed photos of fish after fly fishing Oct. 1 on the Kankakee River, noting, “I caught a bunch of them. . . northern sunfish? Beautiful fish!”

They were beautiful little fish. Longear, northern, and pumpkinseed sunfish are the most visually aesthetically striking among our native fish.

I figured it a long time ago, but Gorman isn’t an idiot, so I checked my Seek app. He identified it as a long one. But external applications are helpers, not oracle pronouncements. Also, I suspected that the iNaturalist database (I use Seek, iNaturalist’s country cousin, because it works better with low reception) didn’t have much on northern sunfish.

It wasn’t until 2013 that the American Fisheries Society recognized the northern sunfish (Lepomis peltastes) as a separate species. Before that, it was considered a subspecies of the long sunfish (Lepomis megalotis).

I went old school and found a key to the northern sunfish. The photos checked all the boxes, so I looked for people smarter and more experienced than me.

Chris Taylor, curator emeritus of fish and crustaceans at the Illinois Natural History Survey, agreed that it looked like a northern sunfish.

INHS researcher Phil Willink agreed, adding: “I’m mainly looking at the red around the opercular flap and the angle of the flap. . . . It’s great that you’re spreading the word about these two species and that people are actually paying attention!”

It is important that we appreciate our native fish.

“Yes, I would call this a northern sunfish, with that round body shape and red at the edge of the ear,” he emailed Trent Thomas, a stream biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. ”I collected northern sunfish and longer sunfish from a site on the Vermilion River in Oglesby (on October 1).”

It’s worth a closer look.

Wild Things

I see a lot of fallen apples on back roads, but I don’t see many mushrooms or hear much from mushroom hunters.