Evaluating the Potential for a Sex-Balanced Harvest Approach in the Recreational Summer Flounder Fishery

Abstract

Summer Flounder Paralichthys dentatus support important recreational and commercial fisheries along the northeast and mid-Atlantic coasts of the USA. In the recreational sector, management efforts to constrain harvest below the maximum allowable catch have typically involved increasing the minimum landing size; however, females grow faster than males. Thus, reliance on increased minimum size limits as a management strategy has resulted in approximately 90% of the recent recreational landings being large, female fish. We evaluated the potential for slot limits to produce a sex-balanced harvest in the recreational Summer Flounder fishery. To estimate the size- and sex-specific vulnerability, we sampled the landed and discarded fish (n = 3,290) caught by recreational anglers on select party boats from New Jersey to Rhode Island during the 2016 recreational fishing season. We then examined the performance of a wide array of slot limits to estimate which would have promoted a more sex-balanced harvest while maintaining a fixed fishing mortality given the observed catch composition. We demonstrate that slot limits applied to the recreational Summer Flounder fishery have the potential to simultaneously meet multiple management objectives, including the conservation of female biomass while maintaining a fixed fishing mortality; however, no single slot limit performed best at all sampling locations. Results should therefore be viewed as optimal given the observed catch composition for the year, fishing mode, and locations that were observed, and further evaluation of interannual, spatial, and fishing mode variability is warranted.

Received March 17, 2017; accepted July 26, 2017Published online October 20, 2017

Acknowledgments

We thank the captains and crews of the FVs Porgy IV, Bonanza II, Big Mohawk, Fishermen, Laura Lee, Lazy Bones, and Gail Frances for permitting us to collect samples aboard their fishing vessels. We are grateful to Sarah Borsetti, Emerson Hasbrouck, Scott Curato-Wagemann, Tara Froelich, and Kristin Gerbino for helping with data collection. Eleanor Bochenek assisted with coordinating sampling trips, for which we are thankful. Helpful comments were provided by Rich Wong and two anonymous reviewers. Partial funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry–University Cooperative Research Center Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCeMFiS) through membership fees under the direction of the Industry Advisory Board; SCeMFiS administrative support is provided by NSF award 1266057. Additional funding was provided by the Save the Summer Flounder Fishery Fund and the Jersey Coast Anglers Association. The conclusions and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors.