My take on what caused the winter flounder stock to flatline. Look at the attached landings levels between commercial and recreational. Plot those numbers against the decline in the spawning stock. Like Sal mentioned, the inshore flounder fishery typically came down to a month or less of fishing. Almost no one fished for flounder in the fall when they arrived from their offshore summering grounds. During the winter, the fish are in the mud and infrequently feed unless you have warm days and an incoming tide when a few might come out of the mud to feed. You could see the mud all over their white side. Very few fish were harvested during the fall and winter months.
In the spring when water temperatures rose, the fish would come out of the mud, females would drop their eggs and fish would school up and start feeding heavy in anticipation of their easterly migration to their summering ground. That's when most recreational fish were harvested and the duration was somewhere between 4 - 6 weeks max. The duration between females coming out of the mud and dropping eggs was probably 2 weeks. One weekend females would have full egg sacks, following weekend they were all empty.
While I agree recreational daily harvest limits were too high, I don't believe a fishery which really amounted to 4 - 6 weeks out of the year with a very small window harvesting egg laden females ruined a fishery. Rec's harvested the same way throughout the 70's and 80's and the fishery was as strong as ever throughout those decades. Did we contribute, you have to agree we did. Did inshore habitat issues effect the spawn, you have to think they might have. Did predation (seals, cormorants etc.) have an impact, probably but they weren't nearly as prolific back then as they are today.
Winter flounder can live for 15 - 18 years and females can lay in excess of 3 million eggs annually. If you look at the spawning stock chart, SSB went from 50 million pounds around 1981 to 15 million pounds over the next seven or eight years, a 70% decline in 7 - 8 years. Look at commercial landings, not to mention the levels of discards they must have operated at, over that time frame. Commercial is a year round fishery, not 4 - 6 weeks. Whether females are harvested coming out of the mud in the spring or any time throughout the year, the net result is less females and mature breeders in the biomass. Again larger older age classes representing the future of the fishery. Fisheries can't sustain that pressure and that's what happened to the winter flounder fishery.
Look at the attached pic, it's from an article that appeared in the Asbury Park Press. Note the comments in the article from the following link by Willie Egerter, owner / Captain of the Dauntless.
https://www.app.com/story/sports/out...ttom/14759557/
In the early 80's, I had a night trip aboard a friends boat chunking bass in Raritan Bay. We couldn't find bunker so we went over to Belford to see if any boats were off loading. They were, I'll never forget this. The guy took me inside the freezers they use to store fish. There had to be 20 of the large heavy corrugated containers they use for off loads (probably four feet high each) and every one was loaded with the largest winter flounder I've ever seen in my life other than maybe fish seen from the Gulf of Maine stock in Nova Scotia. Fish had to average 4 - 5 lbs, they were absolutely huge. I turned to my friend and said, there goes another fishery. My guess is they were harvested from the mudhole area. Where they were harvested doesn't matter, the fact they were harvested with obviously larger species being targeted does. Again it's the same story being told over and over. If you kill the breeders, you kill recruitment and by default you kill the fishery. That's what happened to the winter flounder stock. Pollution, climate change, predation didn't kill this fishery. A year round harvest commercially, total tonnage harvested and the targeting of older age higher market value breeders took this fishery down within 6 - 7 years. No different than what's currently happening with the summer flounder stock.
When I was growing up and the fishery was healthy, every summer the bottom was paved in Shark River with juvenile winter flounder. There were so many it looked like the bottom was moving around the floating docks at Fisherman's Den. No more, they're gone because recruitment today is less than 10% of what it was in the 70's and 80's. I assure you that didn't happen from recreational anglers fishing maybe 6 weeks out of an entire season.
