Reprinted from the Carteret County News-Times.
MOREHEAD CITY — The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries has scheduled a daylong symposium on the southern flounder fishery, which is in such bad shape that the spring season was canceled in 2023 and the fall season was only a couple of weeks long.
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The event will be Wednesday, March 20 at the Riverfront Convention Center in New Bern and will begin at 9 a.m.
The symposium will provide an opportunity for stakeholders, researchers and division staff to discuss various topics related to southern flounder, which up until the last few years has been one of the most valuable finfish species harvested by commercial and recreational fishermen in the state.
Everyone – the state and commercial and recreational fishermen – want the officially overfished stock rebuilt, though they disagree on who’s to blame for the decline and how it should be done.
In 1994, the North Carolina commercial southern flounder season was worth more than $8 million, with a catch of 4.8 million pounds, but it’s been steadily declining since then. In 2022, the last year for which statistics are available on the fisheries division website, it was worth only $934,187 million for a catch of about 364,000.
Commercial fishermen have traditionally used trawls and pound nets to harvest summer flounder, fishing offshore in the winter and inshore in the summer. Recreational fishermen use hook-and-line and gigs.
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Though southern flounder range along all of the South Atlantic Coast, the symposium will focus on North Carolina-centric research and management.
The goals are to allow stakeholders to engage with each other, as well as researchers and NCDMF staff, on topics related to southern flounder and to provide stakeholders the opportunity to learn about and contribute to ongoing flounder research.
Topics include the following:
- Life history.
- Movement and migration through tagging work.
- How habitat and water quality influence southern flounder.
- Citizen science and involvement: What can the public do to help?
- Southern Flounder Management Plan Amendment 3.
- Carcass collection program.
- Tagging program/Volunteer Tagger Program.
The 2023 recreational flounder season this year opened at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 15 closed at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 29.
The possession limit was only one flounder per person per day, and the minimum size limit was 15 inches.
The commercial season was equally harsh on the watermen, with low limits on harvest that differed by region.
At the time it announced the seasons, division officials said the goal was to begin to end overfishing and to begin to rebuild the stock within the timeline set by the management plan.
The state fisheries division, in collaboration with other states, including South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, is updating the southern flounder coastwide stock assessment.
While North Carolina data shows an improved abundance of flounder, the coastwide assessment will provide a science-based approach to determine the stock’s status. Assessment results are expected to be presented to the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission, the policy-making arm of the division, this year.
This story is provided courtesy of the Carteret County News-Times, a twice-weekly newspaper published in Morehead City. Coastal Review partners with the News-Times to provide our readers with news of the North Carolina coast.
