In 1984, New York’s recreational fishermen took home about 14.5 million winter flounder, a harvest that totaled about 13.9 million pounds and dwarfed the 1.35 million pounds of flounder that was landed by the state’s commercial fishermen in the same year. Winter flounder made up over one-third of the nearly 40 million fish landed by […]
Category Archives: Winter Flounder
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Fisheries don’t collapse all at once. Instead, they telegraph their distress with signals that may be subtle at the start, but grow more insistent as stocks decline. Often, at least in the case of migratory stocks, the first sign of trouble might be a contraction of the fish’s range. On the East Coast of the […]
Winter Flounder: Managers Wave the White Flag
It’s hard to watch a fishery die, particularly one that you’ve been a part of for virtually all of your life. I’ve long mourned the demise of the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic (SNEMA) stock of winter flounder. I’m not sure when I caught my first flounder, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was […]