minkmaster

Are flounder a very prolific fish??? I mean see alot of flounder gigged they must lay eggs by the millions to be able to take that kind of pressure.

Five Prongs Of Fury

Flounder normally migrate offshore between November and January depending upon the temperature, the actual spawning can go on for up to 2 months with each female producing between 40,000-60,000 eggs ever 3-7 days for the entire 2 month period.So the eggs can number in the millions, but as we all know no where near this many of them will survive.

johnboatjosh

yeah, what he said In all seriousness Five Prongs is right on the money, flounder do lay tons of eggs (just as other fish do) in order to ensure the continuation of the species.

Death From Above

There's really not that much pressure on flounders from gigging. There's only a handful of folks that can consistantly gig a limit of flounders and even thosefolks don't load up everytime. The shrimpers do more damage to the flounder population than recreational rod/gig fishing. They killbillions of juvenileflounders (and a bunch of everything else) through by catch.

Five Prongs Of Fury

I agree 100% with DFA. We talked to game warden a few years back and he said that he wasn't even concerned with what fish we had. He said that the commercial shrimpers were scooping them up by the thousands of pounds. He said most of the smaller fish were left to die on the deck before anyone decided to wash them off. :looser And he also said that this was going on unchecked because there was little that he could do about it. This was however as I said before few years back and since then I think that they have greatly restricted the amount of shrimping allowed in the bays.:nonono If not for that the flounder would probably be on the endangered species list by now!!! :reallycrying At least we do have a few level headed people making decisions where it counts.

minkmaster

Are shrimp not out off the coast too. Why do they allow fish to be wasted like that then want to give a flounder gigger a ticket for gigging any more than 10 flounder. Waste like that should piss off anybody that likes inshore fishing.

Five Prongs Of Fury

Alot of the shrimpers used to be foreigners. They were considered (WARDS OF THE GOVERMENT) in other words they are untouchable. Didn't make any sense to me either but thats our government for you.

Shiznik

I think they should regulate the bays so they cannot be trawled by the Shrimpers. Just like the gill net ban, look at the amount of inshore fishing and success its brought by banning them. Gulf Shrimp have a better taste to them JMO. Let the fish eat the Bay Shrimp and us eat the Flounder!