Bill interesting video and great concept. Years ago as a kid in the spring and summer back in Shark River, I'd look along the boat docks which is basically Fisherman's Den today for all kinds of stuff. Crabs, spearing, sea horses, mussels, killies, snappers, fluke, flounder etc. It was full of life. What I remember most is the bottom moving seeming to move! There were so many juvenile flounder on the bottom like the ones in the video it was unreal. Don't know if they were fluke or flounder, but they were one to two inches long and the quantity was incredible. Don't see that anymore which I'm sure coincides with the crash of the flounder and fluke fishery.

A study needs to be done to see what's changed because as I posted a month or so ago, we either have a problem at sea or a problem in the back bay, rivers and estuaries or somewhere in between. Either egg production has collapsed due to size regulations and impacts of commercial harvest during the spawn or it hasn't. Maybe the build up of dog fish is killing a much higher percentage of juvenile summer flounder before they make it inshore or some other form of predator problem. Maybe once in shore Cormorants are destroying the young of the year. Maybe environmental issue are contributing, water salinity, climate change etc. It's the root cause of the problems facing the fishery and we need to figure it out and once understood address it with changed management techniques.

Doesn't sound like it's hard to do with the resources the state and federal governments have as well as private funding from businesses dependent on this fishery but simply talking about size, possession limits, reduced catch quotas and season lengths every year is not addressing the problem one bit. Look at the Striped Bass chart from Fisherman Magazine I posted yesterday under the Fluke Regulations thread developed with data from ASMFC, it's exactly the same trend as summer flounder where the biomass is decreasing due to significant reductions in egg production relative to a sizably larger spawning stock biomass. Interesting in both fisheries, they're being managed with regulations promoting retention of the larger female egg producers, the future of any fishery. Question is the same for both fisheries, figure out what's happening with recruitment dropping, implement measures to correct it and the health of the fishery and people / businesses dependent on it will all improve exponentially. Stick with the management philosophies that landed us here and both fisheries will continue failing.