Red Shiner

Red shiners are found naturally in a variety of aquatic habitats, including backwaters, creek mouths, streams containing sand and silt substrates, riffles, and pools. They are tolerant of areas of frequent high turbidity and siltation, but they tend to avoid waters with high acidity. Red shiner are habitat generalists in that they are adapted to favor a wide range of environmental conditions that are not ideal to most other fish species. These include habitats degraded by human disturbance, and those with poor water quality (such as polluted waterways), natural physiochemical extremes, and seasonally intermittent flows.

The spawning season for red shiners is generally from mid-April through September. In addition to spawning in crevices like other members of the genus Cyprinella, red shiners also broadcast their eggs and attach them to rocks or vegetation. Females can release up to 16 batches per day with up to 71 eggs per batch. The average clutch size, however, is 585 eggs and they may have five to 19 clutches in one reproductive season. Red shiners are capable of generating viable hybrid offspring with closely related species, such as the blue shiner and the blacktail shiner.