Page 30 - Outdoor Oklahoma Magazine Mar-Apr2023

Perhaps the best example of dimorphism in the country. He’s an encyclopedia of all things
longears is the development of the male’s strik- longear and has been cited in a wide range of
ing breeding colors. These consist of varying fisheries books and publications during the last
shades of intense electric blues and turquoise four decades.
greens, contrasting with deep reds and vivid Bauer began working with longears in 1973 at
glossy oranges. The exact patterns, markings, Eastern Kentucky University as an undergraduate,
and combinations of these colors is quite com- counting scales on longears from all over North
plex and covers the entire face, body, and fins. America. “When we looked at the ones from the
These colors are most intense during summer Little River drainage in southeast Oklahoma, they
and seem to glow and produce vibrant flashes of really stood out. And the longer we looked, the
color in the right lighting conditions. By compari- more they stood out.”
son, females are plain and ordinary-looking, with After finishing his undergraduate degree in
dull and muted colors. Kentucky, Bauer moved to Tennessee Tech for his
Longears are colorful throughout Oklahoma, master’s degree and then on to the University of
but what’s interesting is that they look different Tennessee to work on his doctorate project with
depending on where they are found. While a longear and dollar sunfish. “We were looking at
largemouth bass caught in Mississippi looks just everything and measuring anything that could
like one caught in Wisconsin, longears don’t all be different — things such as how many pectoral
look the same. rays, which ray is the longest, how much longer is
it, how many scales in the lateral line, how many
scales above the lateral line, how many around
the caudal peduncle, etcetera.” These assess-
ments were performed on literally thousands of
fish, and the work continues even now.
Over the years, Bauer would set the project
aside and pick it up again, but he never gave
up on finishing it. A few years ago, he had an
opportunity to look at longear variation using
genomic-scale DNA sequencing. “It was really
expensive, and some of the new DNA science
stuff is over my head. But I was able to part-
ner with some topnotch geneticists from Yale
(Daemin Kim and Thomas Near) and finally take
a closer look at some of these different forms of
longears. My morphometric work said they were
different, but I really needed to be able to con-
firm it with DNA, too.”
The results confirmed much of what Bauer had
believed for years. In 2021, he co-authored a
paper on the findings: Lepomis megalotis wasn’t
one species with several different forms, but a
complicated group of fish with enough genetic
and morphological (size and shape) variation to
These differences in appearance are signifi- warrant the recognition of six stand-alone spe-
cant enough to raise the question of whether cies. Three of these occur in Oklahoma, with two
they are all fish of a single species. This has of them being newly recognized and still yet to
been discussed by a handful of ichthyologists be formally named. Bauer said that work is in
over the years. progress now and should be announced this year.
One of these is Bruce Bauer of Tennessee, who While Oklahoma’s two new longear species
has studied Oklahoma’s longear variations and were “unknown to science” and are just now
is trying to finish his life’s work unravelling North being recognized, it doesn’t mean they are newly
America’s longear sunfish speciation. discovered, as in “never seen before.” All three of
Bauer’s tremendous undertaking spans 50 Oklahoma’s longear species are common where
years of collecting, identifying, and document- they occur and well-known to anglers and biolo-
ing differences in longear sunfish from across gists alike. But the research by Bauer and others

28 OUTDOOR OKLAHOMA