Read the following two articles regarding commercial squid harvest.

https://www.mvtimes.com/2016/09/07/s...thas-vineyard/

and

http://n-magazine.com/somethings-fishy/

I bring it up because there's been many posts as to why summer flounder fishing is so much better out east than in local waters. Less commercial fishing pressure is one reason, huge amounts of restricted areas closed to ground fishing is another. BUT another reason is the amount of squid that inhabit their local waters, a primary forage fish for fluke.

Read the two attached articles and it'll make you realize the amount of waste involved in the commercial harvest. First article / video (video is at end of article) reminds me of the days years ago when acres of baby ling and whiting were scattered throughout the Mudhole area and we know the outcome of that story. Second article further magnifies the extent of the problem. Two comments stand out:

"Last year, commercial fishing boats were allowed under existing federal rules to harvest 19 million pounds of squid between May and August, even though the quota for that period was only 8.4 million pounds."

and

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council in June endorsed a package of regulatory changes that would limit the future expansion of the fishery and reduce the squid catch in summer months when squid are spawning. "POSITIVE DECISION BY MAFMC" Squid are easier to catch when they are spawning because they aggregate. "SAME PROBLEM WITH SUMMER FLOUNDER" Females lay as many as three hundred eggs encased within gelatinous capsules that are anchored to the seafloor. Dragging their nets on the bottom, fishing trawlers dislodge the capsules from the ocean floor.

While some squid fishermen contend that this process helps distribute the eggs, researchers contend otherwise. Working with squid in captivity, Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Resources Center in Woods Hole, found that dislodging eggs causes the eggs to hatch prematurely. Because their stomachs have yet to be fully formed, they are unable to eat. “Those animals do not survive,” he says. “They are all dead.”

Precisely what I believe is happening with summer flounder as 64% of the commercial summer flounder catch, most of which is harvested in the fall and winter months during the spawn, comes from three areas 616, 537 and 613 which are all located south and east of Long Island / Montauk around the continental shelf. Highly concentrated schools being harvested all winter long.

Keep harvesting during their spawn and shrinking the stocks food source and they'll search out areas with sufficient forage which many will attribute to geographic movement the result of other factors.

Fisheries management is as much if not more about catch composition as it is about overall catch, protecting and promoting recruitment and considering the consequences environmental and policy decisions are having on the overall food chain. If there's an imbalance in any of those three, the fishery will struggle. Summer flounder has a serious problem with two of the three.

5:00 TODAY IS THE CUTOFF FOR PUBLIC COMMENTS, PLEASE KEEP YOUR COMMENTS COMING. THERE'S NO GUARANTEES BUT YOUR OPINIONS MATTER AND THEY CAN ONLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR THE BETTER SO THERE'S ONLY UPSIDE.