Can anyone tell me what this is? They're all perch to me, but these pretty little guys fight hard for their size

Bait

Green sunfish

Good call!

+1

Love those greenies!

Green Sunfish not a perch.Perch is a different spcies Someone call them perch long ago and it stuck. Perch isn`t in the sunfish family.

Perch have been a slang word for sunfish a very long time! Plus #1 on the Sunfish family!

Perch do not exist in Texas

Eric

Log Perch are in Texas. They get stuck in my cast net all the time.

Texas is full of perch. Perch is a WORD that is used in different locals to identify a variety of fish. Very few of us use the Latin taxonomic names for fish A perch is any of a number of smaller scaled fish. You have white perch, yellow perch, sun perch, goggle-eyed perch, green perch and probably others in various locals. I had never heard a white perch called a Crappie until I was half grown and when I did I thought it was a derogatory term. People everywhere in the world have their own names for often the same fish. All that really matters is that the person you are talking to knows which fish goes by that name locally. We also have Gaspergoo, Grindels, loggerhead turtles, and any number of other locally named finny fishes and such.

To a kid or someone that just fishes a few times the exact identification just isn't important. If they go perch fishing they don't need to know the exact identification of the different varieties any more than they do when they go catfishing or bass fishing. Very few casual fishermen can tell the difference between a bluegill and a redear or between an adult blue cat or a channel cat or between a largemouth bass and a spotted bass or a white from a black crappie. They get along fine nonetheless.

Later if they get a lot more interested like most of us they will learn a lot more about the differences and habits of the various different varieties but a lot of us never shed the names we learned as kids and novices and still use those names in casual conversation.

Oh and that is a Green sunfish or as we called it when I was a kid a Green Perch. They are a lot like a goggle-eyed perch in that they have a larger mouth than most perch and are crazy aggressive. I have caught more of them while bass fishing than when I was actually perch fishing. They will attack a lure that is almost as large as they are!!

Well put Texdanm, it is that local word choice that adds color and favor to language. It would be boring if we we spoke "new speak"

You know, a Largemouth is actually a sunfish and not a bass. I've had that discussion before too. A bass is actually a saltwater fish. Largemouth and Smallmouth sunfish are called bass because they LOOK more like the saltwater striped bass than they do the sunfish. Even the Red Drum is called a Channel Bass in a lot of areas. There is a cichlid in South America that is showing up in Florida now that is called a Peacock Bass. Lake Trout are not trout they are char. What difference does it make as long as we all know what we are talking about?

I will say that back in the 70s when all the people came to Texas from the North when cars were not selling and we were working around the clock on oil related jobs it WAS fun. They had all different names for the fish and we all just looked at them like they were crazy. I had never heard of places that have fishing season like we have hunting season. They fished different from us too. It was all fun and a learning experience for all of us. I learned about the pleasures of ultralite fishing and introduced several of them to the pleasures of fishing for 100+ lb gars.

The very BEST thing was when you warned them to watch out for the KILLER Texas RATS when they were fishing then waited for them to spot a nutria rat that weighed 20 to 25 lbs!! I took one fishing to one of my favorite fishing holes. We were wade fishing and he got way out there before he figured out that we were sharing that pool with about 5 big gators. Those gators had no interest in him but he didn't care!!! He did a pretty good imitation of Jesus and then fished from the bank waiting fer me to get eaten. I had been swimming and fishing in that hole nearly all my life. Gators are good neighbors as long as you understand them.