Sunfish & Crappie

Bluegill Sunfish

There is scarcely a body of water in the state that does not have Bluegills in it. Bluegills get to a foot long, but are seldom seen at that size.

All sunfishes are aggressive and territorial. Their belligerence is heightened in the confines of an aquarium, where you may start out with several small ones, but you will end up with just one big one. A sunfish will tear a fish-store cichlid to pieces. They adapt readily to regular fish food, but lose most of the attractive wild colors.

-- Wikipedia


Pumpkinseed Sunfish

The Pumpkinseed is the second most common type of sunfish

-- Wikipedia


Redbreast Sunfish

note the long 'ear'

Redbreasts can be found in the D&R Canal.

-- Wikipedia


Black Crappie

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Crappies are fun to fish for - seems they'll hit just about anything. They also do well in an aquarium, where they are not aggressive towards anything they do not regard as food. They do require live food like minnows, although eventually you can train most individuals to take freeze-dried krill and worms.

-- Wikipedia


After Google sent me a bill for their map service, I decided to switch to OpenLayers maps, which are free. And I quickly came to like them better. At first, I thought the satellite imagery was neat, but it turns out that often things are hidden under trees. Also, the coordinates on the satellite imagery are less-than-accurate. Google's street maps are also less-than-accurate, and also less-than-informative, lacking accurate borders and labels ( although they do have lots of advertising! )

As I got the hang of OpenLayers, I started to redo a lot of things and simplify, getting rid of a lot of stuff I had done to make up for the shortcomings of Google Maps. OpenLayers maps look a lot like USGS quadrangles, and don't need a lot of help, just zoom in and there is a wealth of information. Google's maps are also strongly colored, which makes it difficult at times to do anything with them. OpenLayers uses nice muted colors that are easy to write over.

But satellite imagery is still interesting and informative, so I added links to both Google Earth and Bing servers. A great deal of functionality comes from an plugin I wrote to help-out the main maps plugin. I've also made a few changes and bug fixes to that, which I hope the developer will eventually incorporate. The irony of this, for Google anyway, is that the free products are actually much better than the paid ones.

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