This pretty little fish, properly known as a spotted sunfish, is quite often caught by bluegill fishermen who are fishing in sluggish streams, swamps and lowland lakes. Most look at them and shrug their shoulders because they don’t know what they are, judge them to be a little too small to clean and toss them back overboard.
But this chunky-bodied little bream deserves another look from fishermen. A bluegill of the same length would be wafer-thin and yield little meat, but a stumpknocker is deceptively thick and, for its size, easy to fillet.
The fish is well-named as a spotted sunfish. The lower two-thirds of a male’s body has reddish-orange dots arranged one to a scale. Female’s spots are confined mostly to the belly and are lighter in color. The colorful spots on the male give it a brick-red appearance at first glance. Females are more dominated by a dark-green body color, similar to that on the backs of males.
Spotted sunfish, unlike sunperch, are seldom caught near beds of spawning bluegills. Most anglers find them while they are fishing along shorelines looking for bluegill beds. They tend to build their nests solitarily or in small groups.
Very often, a spot will yield both a male and a female fish, and then no more. Stumpknockers are bottom-feeders that tend to specialize in aquatic insects and other bottom life. They don’t target land insects that have fallen in the water, but are very easy to catch with live crickets or worms.