Fluke Regs this year

[Gerry Zagorski]

Originally Posted by dakota560

Frugal my opinion, 17"-20" are still primarily females and doesn't address the commercial problem. Look again at the first chart I posted in my earlier email. I'd propose as a start a slot as low as 14" - 15" with maybe one fish allowed over 15" with no upside limit. If commercial operators can harvest 14" fish, recreational anglers should be afforded the same opportunity. That would greatly help Party and Charter boats, wouldn't effect one fish tournaments and most important would start reducing the pressure on larger female fluke. It's a good start.

Fishery management still has to address the commercial side of this and in my opinion the way to do it involves two changes. Level the retail price differential for large and smaller fluke so that a 14" fluke brings equivalent value as a 23" fish. That would immediately eliminate the culling or dead discard problem. Once operators hit their daily quota, no one would drop their nets again if there's no incremental value to be gained. How you change the market price is beyond my pay grade but someone should be able to figure it out if the health of the fishery is what's at stake.

Second as I've said, close the spawn season for 2-3 years and conduct studies on the impact on egg reproduction. That's the only path to recovery. Remember when we had a 14" - 15.5" inch size limit with an 8 fish possession limit, the biomass increased to it's highest level on record in 2002. In addition, look at overall catch, it was almost double in 2002 compared to today. Check the chart I posted. Coincidence, again I don't believe so. That in itself should highlight the problem and be the basis of establishing a sound recovery plan which can be monitored and quantified.

Lots of people concerned about the commercials being allowed to keep 14" Fluke when we're forced to take 18"...Why not let them fill their quota with 14 inch fish. If you make it 18 like us, what happens to all those 14 inch fish they catch in their nets? They'll wind up being dead discards and are wasted.

Originally Posted by Gerry Zagorski

Lots of people concerned about the commercials being allowed to keep 14" Fluke when we're forced to take 18"...Why not let them fill their quota with 14 inch fish. If you make it 18 like us, what happens to all those 14 inch fish they catch in their nets? They'll wind up being dead discards and are wasted.

Gerry I'm actually not against commercials being allowed to keep 14" fish, I'm in favor of it for the reason you cited. What I said earlier is we should have a slot limit introduced where recreational anglers and Party and Charter boats have the same opportunity, both would take pressure off the harvest of the larger female breeders.

My issue with commercial is the retail price I've mentioned. If 14" fish aren't being hygraded with larger fluke which carry a significantly higher retail value, you're comment is correct. If they are, which I absolutely believe to be the case, then the smaller fluke become dead discard anyway. You know it's happening on these long range winter trips. No way commercial guys are coming back in from that far off shore if they can increase the value of their catch by 60% - 70% with larger fish. The issue is market price here, not size limit for commercials. As I said, make the price per pound for a 14" fish the same as a 23" fish and the entire issue of hygrading and dead discard goes away. This isn't a size / possession limit issue, this is an FMP / market price issue. Basically what I'm saying is regulate the retail market prices to commercial to take the incentive away from harvesting larger female fluke. The disparity in retail prices they're getting for larger fluke is causing the entire hygrading problem, correct it and problem solved.

Look at the attached video I posted two years ago. Look at the size fish being discarded, they have to be 5 lbs. minimum and up. Everyone of those fish thrown back plus every fish retained as part of their catch was more likely than not a female. If it was September, October or November, there's a good chance they were loaded with eggs. If that's what was discarded dead, imagine the size of the fish retained and how many smaller fish from 14" on up were killed in the process of catching their quota. One boat, multiply that by the number of commercial boats involved and extrapolate out how huge the dead discard number must be. You think on the FVTR (Fishing Vessel Trip Report) log the captain reported how many fish were thrown back dead, not a chance. It's an enormous problem being completely overlooked by fisheries management all because the commercial industry has lobbying clout recreational doesn't. It's tragic what's happening at sea and what's worse is it's all correctable. Gerry to my earlier point, if the price paid per lb. to commercials for 14" fish was the same as the price paid for those larger fish thrown overboard, those beautiful fluke tossed overboard dead would never have been harvested because there would have been no incremental economic value to what was probably already on board. Please check out the attached video, it'll make you sick. Absolute waste of the resource and in my opinion a major reason egg reproduction has all but collapsed over the last twenty years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inSN...ature=youtu.be

[Detour66]

The new administration recently signed the "Modern Fishing Act". Does this act have the potential of correcting the unfair and ignorant regulations that are now in place? Can anyone answer this or is it a "wait and see" situation?

Originally Posted by Detour66

The new administration recently signed the "Modern Fishing Act". Does this act have the potential of correcting the unfair and ignorant regulations that are now in place? Can anyone answer this or is it a "wait and see" situation?

Here's a link which explains a bit about the recently signed Modern Fishing Act. I believe it gives states and the recreational angling community more options or leverage but not sure it alters the provisions of MSA directly. There's others on the site much more versed in this who could chime in here.

http://www.trcp.org/2019/01/01/presi...dern-fish-act/

It's definitely a step in the right direction but with any legislation it needs to be time tested to understand what impact it's ultimately going to have. There's a lot of people fighting for recreational interests and giving their time, significant amounts at that. The biggest drawback as others have mentioned is recreational is not as well organized as commercial and we have a shadow of their funding and lobbying power. From my perspective, when fisheries management starts making the right decisions to rebuild stocks and when rebuilt gives both recreational anglers and commercial concerns equal access and equitable allocations unlike what's happening with the Sea Bass fishery, then the system is working.

[Merle31483]

If everyone is concerned about the fluke fishery for the future which it seems like everyone is than the approach should be taken into consideration in comparison to the blue fin tuna fishery have a set number of pounds allocated for a season and when that amount of pounds is reached seasons closed set a size limit that will make everybody happy that won't kill the party boat fishing industry and take it from there

Originally Posted by Merle31483

If everyone is concerned about the fluke fishery for the future which it seems like everyone is than the approach should be taken into consideration in comparison to the blue fin tuna fishery have a set number of pounds allocated for a season and when that amount of pounds is reached seasons closed set a size limit that will make everybody happy that won't kill the party boat fishing industry and take it from there

Review the attached charts from the data table I posed earlier. The data supports the fact that catch or pounds as you referred to it is not the problem. We were harvesting a significantly higher percentage of the biomass and catch totals (metric tonnage) in the absolute between the years 1989 and 2002 than today and during those years the biomass increased ~600%. Now compare that to the chart recruitment relative to size limit increases beginning around 2000 showing an absolute inverse relationship between size limit increases and reduction in recruitment statistics over the last 15 years. Last chart shows recruitment numbers in the absolute, it's been decimated and remember it's fallen off a cliff at a time when the biomass is significantly larger. Again that's a trend which should be on everyone's radar screen and the single most important issue fisheries management should be focusing in on.

Problem with your suggestion is it's basically what the angling community has been asking for over the last few decades. Problem is twofold. Compliance with Magnuson Stevens Act provisions and NMFS and ASMFC focusing solely on catch and their past practices of ONLY increasing size limits, reducing possession limits and overall harvest totals. From what I understand, data and conclusions from Rutgers "Sex and Length" study indicating most fluke landed at 18" are females is being incorporated in Peer Review so hopefully at some point in the next year or two a slot size will be introduced. It's one of several steps necessary in my opinion to the recovery of this fishery.

One of the graphs from Rutger's study which illustrates the relationship of length and sex for summer flounder. Graph is in centimeters, 18 inches equals 45.72 centimeters. You can see how disproportionate the relationship is between males and females as size increases to the point where almost all fish over 19.5 inches are females. NMFS's insistence on increasing size to control catch relative to this data is one of the reasons recruitment has been decimated. Combine that with the following statistics and the results are disastrous.

Reproduction:
Both males and females become sexually mature at the age of 3. The fecundity (number of eggs produced in a single spawning season) of females increases with size and weight. A 14 inch female produces about 460,000, and a 27 inch female about 4,200,000 eggs in a season. Reproduction takes place in the fall, as soon as the fish begin migrating to wintering grounds. Peak spawning activity occurs from early September through early November in water temperatures of 53 to 66 degrees F and at depths of 60 to 160 feet. The center of spawning activity occurs off the coasts of New York and New Jersey with less concentrated activity occurring in southern New England waters. The eggs float in the water column, hatching 72 to 75 hours after being laid.

Translated, not only are we harvesting almost exclusively breeders, every time size limits are increased we're increasing the harvest of larger females with considerably greater egg production capacity at what could conceivably be a 10:1 ratio. Couple that with the commercial fleet harvesting concentrated schools of migrating fish during their fall / winter offshore migration and spawn and NMFS / ASMFC wonders why the biomass is trending down over the last 15 years. You can draw your own conclusions but the data strongly supports a gender imbalance created in the biomass by size increase legislation over the last almost twenty years compounded by commercial harvest in the fall / winter months during the spawn without understanding the negative impacts that harvest has on overall egg reproduction. It's obvious for every female harvested we lose the immediate benefit of that years egg production. Larger question in my opinion is how many eggs already released are destroyed by continued netting and what impact does the harvest have on stressing out the biomass, potentially impeding it's ability to reproduce. No one to my knowledge has that answer and it arguably might be one of the most important pieces of the puzzle.