Bluegill Cultivar Development Project

Project Title: Food-fish Cultivar Development of Bluegill Sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus).

Principal Investigator: Dr. James Wetzel.

Project Summary: The goal of this project is to create two lineages of a genetically diverse bluegill sunfish optimized for food-fish production. Source populations are to be a combination of domestic and wild stocks from throughout the bluegill sunfish's natural range. Hereditability of growth within the founding population through market size is to be estimated. Efforts will be made to increase control over reproduction in the pond production setting through combinations of mono-sex production populations, interspecies hybridization and ploidy manipulation.