Ounce for ounce, pint-sized sunfish are among the toughest fighters in the ring.

Story and photography by Matt Williams

Stories about sunfish the size of a dinner plate always grab my attention.

Years ago, I heard about a North Carolina teenager named Travis Jackson who reeled in a real whopper from a neighbor’s stock tank in Edgecombe County.  The way the story goes, the 13-year-old was fishing from shore with his mother when something gobbled up the night crawler he was using for bait and powered away in the opposite direction.

The young angler eventually played the fish into submission. Jackson’s redear sunfish was way bigger than most. The colorful fish weighed 4 pounds, 15 ounces. It measured slightly more than 15 inches long and 18 1/8 inches around the girth. Jackson still holds the North Carolina redear state record with the fish he caught in 2008.

By comparison, the world record redear is significantly larger. The 6.30 pounder was caught five years ago at Lake Havasu in Arizona by Wisconsin angler Thomas Farchione. It was 17 inches long with a 20-inch girth.

Farchione’s catch bested the former world record of 5.78  pounds. That giant was caught in 2014 by Hector Brito, also on the 19,300-acre Lake Havasu.

According to International Game Fish Association records, Brito’s fish topped the record before it by four ounces. Lake Havasu also produced that fish, a 5-pound, 8-ounce bruiser caught by local angler Robert Lawler.

It’s anybody’s guess what sparked the impressive run on huge super-sized redear at Havasu, but some believe it coincided Arizona’s warm climate and year-round growing season combined with the discovery of invasive quagga mussels in the lake in 2007.

The belief is the quaggas provide an abundant, high protein food source to compliment other forage redswamp crawfish and grass shrimp.  Also known as “shellcrackers,” redear have pharyngeal teeth in their throats. The panfish use the teeth to crush the mussel’s hard shell to get at the tasty goodie inside.

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