Sometimes overlooked as anglers pursue other fish, small sunfish provide incredible sport on light tackle. Even renowned professionals most likely started fishing for bluegills or other sunfish.
Many people can’t tell the various sunfish species apart, so they simply call them all “bream” or “perch” in addition to a dozen other names.
Among the most common, widespread and aggressive sunfish, bluegills derive their name from the navy blue “ear flaps” on their gill plates. These fish live in nearly every freshwater system in Florida.
Redear sunfish look like pale bluegills, but with a little scarlet trimming on their ear flaps. Also called shellcrackers because they love to crush snails with grinders in their throats, redears range throughout Florida and can inhabit tidal marshes. They grow larger than bluegills and frequently weigh more than a pound.
A warmouth looks similar to a bluegill in color, but with a larger mouth. Also called goggle-eyes, these thick, dark fish love swamps, shallow weedy lakes, sluggish streams, and canals with thick vegetation and muddy bottoms.
With their large mouths, warmouth sometimes attack bass lures. They can weigh more than 2 pounds, but few exceed
1 pound.
As water temperatures warm in the spring, bream start spawning. They dig out beds in shallow flats. In clear water, people can easily spot these dark depressions on the bottom. Bluegills might spawn several times into the fall and regularly return to the same bedding areas every year.
Many anglers dangle worms or crickets under floats to catch sunfish. They may toss a float over a bed or next to cover and wait for it to twitch or go under the water. Feisty sunfish also eat minnows, small crawfish, bread and anything else they can swallow, but most of all, they love insects.
Because bream feed so heavily on insects, some anglers tempt them with fly tackle. Small floating cork, insect imitations and foam or plastic poppers make great enticements for bluegills. Anglers can also use traditional dry or sinking flies and streamers that mimic minnows.
Pound for pound—or more appropriately, ounce for ounce—bream can outfight anything in fresh water. What they lack in size, they more than compensate for in determination and pugnacious attitude. Bluegills defend their beds from anything that enters their domain.
Tossing a small floating bug over a bream bed or near other cover, and let it rest on the surface a few moments. Then give it a slight twitch or pop. The small but aggressive fish commonly explode on floating lures with strikes.
Another bream temptation: Beetle spinners use jigheads with spinning metal blades that create flash and vibrations in the water. On the hook, thread a soft-plastic trailer, toss the lure to a likely spot and slowly retrieve it so the blades spin.
Anglers might find big action in small packages by tempting these diminutive scrappers. Sunfish live in practically every freshwater system in Florida, from the smallest ponds to the largest lakes and rivers.