I love sunfish, both fresh and salty varieties. Their general shape, as one might suspect, is that of the sun.
The freshwater ones are often called panfish, while their salt water friends must have many names, given the distances they can travel in the open ocean.
The freshwater sunfish I am referring to are those found in North America. They are often stocked in fishing ponds, and are pretty easy to catch when compared to a more elusive species like a trout.
Below you will find a few of my favourite fishes, most of which I have caught at some point in my fishing career.
My summer diet has not been graced by creative sunfish recipes, and all the sunnies I have caught have gone into a friend's pond or our big aquarium. This year the smallest ones (caught in a minnow trap) were the size of a quarter. The biggest ones were as big as my palm.
One of the teeny tinies is in the turtle aquarium right now. It is thriving but is still not big enough to identify. The ones I sent to the pond were mostly identified, but I didn't want to compromise their survivability by keeping them out of the water for too long.
The lucky ones would flip and flop while I tried to take a picture, some even wriggling out of my hand above the pond.....plop!
