Search for Flounder

• No remedy in sight as flat fish all but vanish from local waters: FAIRFIELD — The tide was just coming in off Fairfield Beach and a steady breeze rippled the water, scattering the morning sunlight in a thousand directions.
  
• Three fluke-rigged lines dangled from Jim Orifice's 17-foot Boston Whaler, the submerged sandworms at the end of each still plump and wriggling. It was a near-perfect day for flounder fishing, but no one had told the flounder. Five minutes into the May outing, Orifice was already lamenting the good old days — say, 30 years ago, when the shallows of western Long Island Sound teemed with winter flounder this time of year. "We'd have a fish already," said Orifice, 35, of Fairfield, owner of Jimmy O's Bait & Tackle in Bridgeport and a third-generation flounder fisherman.
• The minutes ticked by, quiet and fishless, as he worked the shallows, patiently plumbing Penfield Reef, then drifting in toward the mouth of Ash Creek. By noon, there had been a few tugs on the lines — crabs, maybe."I can remember going out here Easter Sunday with my father flounder fishing — it was unbelievable," Orifice said, freeing a squirming sandworm from a mantle of seaweed and plunking it back into the water. These days, Orifice said, a lucky angler still might bring home a few on a good day. But in the old days, a good catch of the famously tasty flatfish could swamp a boat.
• The state Department of Environmental Protection confirms what anglers like Orifice already know: the Sound's winter flounder are in trouble. DEP surveys portray a steep decline in winter flounder from 1984 to 2005.
• The agency's spring abundance survey, in which staff members drop nets from a trawler and record the catch, logged an average of 17 winter flounder per net last year. That compares with 112 per net in 1984, a decline of more than 85 percent. A steeper trend is seen in the catch reported to the DEP by recreational fishermen. Recreational landings fell from 1.3 million in 1984 to 4,484 in 2005.Those numbers also reflect the fact that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission last year cut the winter-flounder season to just two months, April and May. The season used to be open, and winter flounder also could be caught in late fall, when they head into estuaries to spawn.
• "The number of young has really been declining since probably the early 1980s — that was sort of a peak period in recent history," said Dave Simpson, supervising fisheries biologist at the DEP's Marine Fisheries Division. "And that started falling off and, of course, the adult stock began to drop off in three, four, five years."
• The decline is so alarming that even some fishermen, including Orifice, say they'd support closing the state's flounder fishery for a few years in hopes the population will rebound. Orifice said anglers deserve to share in the blame because, when flounder were abundant, "we made pigs of ourselves.
  
• "We're the ones who are guilty. We should pay the price and close the fishery," he said. However, DEP officials don't believe overfishing is the main reason for the decline of winter flounder in the Sound — although they can't pinpoint a single cause. State fishery authorities and some anglers say a combination of factors may be at work, natural and manmade. Some blame an increase in predation by other fish and marine birds, possibly exacerbated by global warming that may favor warm-water species that feed on or compete with winter flounder.
• Others say discharge from sewage-treatment plants may be creating a hostile environment for young flounder. Still others say the real mystery is why winter flounder are abundant in the deeper waters mid-Sound and the ocean, where the species traditionally spends the summer and fall. It's possible they just aren't coming to shore to spawn.The issue needs more study, said Lance Stewart, associate professor of marine biology at the University of Connecticut's marine science program at Avery Point in Groton, who sits on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
• He said potential culprits also could include disease, or something — perhaps pesticide-laden runoff — that's killing the worms and shrimplike creatures that young flounder eat. "The [commission's] winter flounder board has been perplexed with this for the last five years and trying to ratchet up management measures, but it hasn't helped," Stewart said.
• Whatever the problem, the DEP's Simpson said, winter flounder have been particularly hard-hit in Long Island Sound and southern New England. "They're doing better in the Gulf of Maine, north of Cape Cod and up into Canada — they're doing better there, but I wouldn't say they're in great shape," he said. He added the problem does not extend to summer flounder, or fluke, a distinct species that spawns offshore and prefers warmer water. Warmer water temperatures may be upsetting the delicate Long Island Sound ecological balance, according to Simpson.
• The average winter water temperature, tracked by the DEP in Waterford, has trended upward — from 34.4 degrees in 1977 to a high of 42.2 in 2002. Winter flounder go into estuaries to spawn during the winter, then emerge for a few months in the coastal shallows before heading out to cooler offshore waters. If the water warms up earlier in the year, while the young flounder are still near the shore, predators such as striped bass may head in to feed on them, Simpson said. "Part of life strategy of spawning in the dead of winter is to avoid predation," he said. "With subtly warmer water temperatures, those predators are able to come out earlier."
• Others lay the blame on a burgeoning population of cormorants — voracious marine birds that can dive underwater and pick small flounder off the sea bottom. On Orifice's recent ill-fated outing, the black silhouette of a cormorant could be seen working the shallows near Ash Creek, arching its neck to peer into the water, then disappearing into it. "They're real crafty hunters — their eyesight is incredible," Orifice said, adding that they're such good anglers that fishermen in Asia keep them on leashes, iron rings around their necks to prevent them from swallowing their prey.
• State Sen. George "Doc" Gunther, a Stratford Republican who sits on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, said he believes the cormorants are killing winter flounder so efficiently that he'd support measures to control the population. But that would be difficult, he said, since cormorants are federally protected migratory birds and any effort to control them would likely meet stiff resistance from animal-rights groups.
• "The federal government should take the restriction off & them and make them open game — allow the shooting of them," Gunther said. Winter flounder also are prey to bluefish, sea robins and seals. And, of course, humans.Timothy Griffith, captain of the Middlebank, a party boat that runs fishing expeditions out of Bridgeport's Captain's Cove, doubts there would be much objection, even from commercial captains, to closing the flounder fishery year-round for several years if that would help.
• Griffith said winter flounder were so plentiful 15 years or so back that you'd literally step on them if you walked out during low tide. "In that short amount of time, we've seen the fishery go from being very good to nothing," he said. "I think that there's so few winter flounder that if they say it's a closed season, people would go fishing for something else."
• In fact, UConn's Stewart said that inshore winter flounder populations are depleted to the point they're no longer a popular recreational catch. For that reason, he doesn't believe anglers present a major threat to the fish, noting that regulations introduced in recent years to help rebuild the population have been largely unsuccessful.
• Among them, he said: The season has been cut, anglers are limited to 10 fish per boat and the mesh size of commercial nets must be at least 6.5 inches to ensure that small flounder can escape."They should be rebounding, especially the way we've taken the heat off," Stewart said. He said he didn't believe closing the fishery in state waters would help as much as targeting funding to study the cause of the problem and, perhaps, transplanting pregnant, or "gravid" females from Canadian waters off Newfoundland.
• He said anglers themselves could do that if they're serious about restoring the fishery. "There's nothing to say that a bunch of fishers can't go to St. George's Bay & contract a dragger, acquire maybe 500 nice, gravid females and bring them back," Stewart said.