My friend Lance Sent me this after I inquired to him about the strange sunfish I caught in the Sabinal...
Hey Jonathan, I sent these out in an email to a friend who has knowledge of the longear and logperch complexes seeing if he was familiar with these - here's what the big dog told me.
"Don't think it's a hybrid, but stil cool. Texas has some
really whacked-out megalotis, and you should see some of them further down into Mexico... Cuatro Cienegas megs are crazy!
Problem is where do you draw the line? Megs seem to be hypervariable, and even though you get discrete differences by drainage (the downturned opercular flap in the White, for instance), until someone does a rangewide genetic assessment to see where the breaks are, they're going to be treated as just highly plastic."
These are pretty much amazing the more I look at em. I so want to see these.
Cheers,
Lance
Pretty interesting...For more on the variability of megalotis, you can check out a thread on warmfly.com:
http://www.warmfly.com/smf/index.php?topic=541.0
Posts
I would have never belived that was a L. Megalotis. Those stripes are throwing me off. I've seen that orange spot somewhere before but I have no idea where, I think it was in some longears I got at Table Rock lake, Missouri
ReplyDeleteWhat you have there is a sub-species of the L. Megalotis, called the Rio Grande Longear Sunfish. They are found in northern Mexico and southern/SW Texas. Longears are divided into 6 subspecies that have not been officially named to a subspecies yet, and one that has been officially split into its own unique species (the Northern Sunfish, Lepomis Peltastes).
ReplyDelete