Thanks for the reply! Interesting on the lifespan.

Very nice fish! I have a somewhat interesting big sunfish story. My early/formative fishing years were spent in pursuit of "bream" as we called all such fish in the southern boonies. I mostly fished a farm pond my granddad built and stocked in the late 1930s or early 1940s, so there were no exotic hybrids in it. Before I was old enough to have a driver's license, I caught 3 or 4 bluegill of an unknown variety from the pond and carried them in a bucket of water to a (female) neighbor's home. We put them in her dad's small 30-35 ft. diameter pond that existed just for a few livestock to have water. Nobody ever bothered it or fished it. We forgot about it.

A number of years later, she told me her father sprayed cattle too close to the pond and poisoned the fish. Her brother spotted two HUGE bluegill floating barely alive. He waded in to get them, and later had them mounted. I was blown away when I saw them - each weighed POUNDS! I have never before or since seen bluegill anywhere near the size of those fish. They were SO huge you'd be inclined to think they were some type of fake, but they weren't. They apparently grew that way from being unmolested with a rich food supply always available in that pond. I'll try to get photos if they still have the mounts....

I should be "back home" over Thanksgiving, so I will try really hard to get in touch with that family and get photos. I kinda want them anyway as I feel I had a part in growing those monsters by putting them there in the first place.