Texas flounder

[Ray]

Texas’ foundering flounder fishery and the hundreds of thousands of anglers who pursue the tasty flatfish saw their futures brighten a bit this past week when staff from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Sea Center carefully released 2,086 inch-long juvenile flounder into a shallow, grassy inlet on West Galveston Bay.
The importance of the event reached far beyond any practical impact that a modest number of baby flounder might have on the flagging fishery or flounder fishers. After all, few of those tiny flounder are likely to survive the two years or so it takes for them to grow to adulthood and become reproductive members of the flatfish community and large enough to be legal targets for anglers.
The release's real significance hinges on the ground it breaks in the effort to use stocking of hatchery-produced fingerlings to enhance flounder populations.
“These are the first flounder ever stocked in the Galveston system,” David Abrego, director of Sea Center Texas, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department saltwater fisheries research and hatchery complex in Lake Jackson, said as he and fisheries biologist Jennifer Bixby prepared the fingerlings for release.
The agency is working to ramp up production of southern flounder, a fish that needs help but has proved to be a challenge for fish culturists to produce in large quantities.
Texas has for more than two decades led the nation in using hatchery-produced marine fish to supplement natural populations, developing methods and technology and building state-of-the-art facilities allowing annual production of tens of millions of redfish and, over the past few years, millions of speckled trout for stocking in the state's bays.
But southern flounder, the third member of the triumvirate that defines Texas' recreational coastal fishery, have been missing from the hatchery mix.
It wasn't because for a lack of need or effort.
Texas' flounder population has been slowly and steadily eroding. Over the past nearly 30 years, the relative abundance of flounder in Texas bays, as gauged by TPWD creel, gill net and bag seine surveys, has dropped by almost half.
Over the same period, populations of other inshore fish held steady or improved even in the face of recreational fishing pressure increasing by 50 percent.
The reasons for the flounder decline are, fisheries managers say, complex and multi-faceted. Loss of inshore nursery habitat, heavy harvest of adult flounder, lower survival of larval flounder for reasons that appear tied to warmer bay waters and even changes in sex ratios of flounder tied to changes in Gulf water temperatures are among the problems fisheries managers cite.
As state fisheries managers moved to address the declining flounder population through regulations reducing harvest, they also began looking at hatchery production as a way to assist the struggling flounder, just as they had with redfish and speckled trout.
“What we found was that hatchery production of flounder was a whole new ballgame,” Abrego said. “It's much more complicated, much more labor intensive.”
The life history and physiology of flounder — southern flounder, the dominant flatfish species found in Texas inshore waters — created challenges for hatchery staff.
“They are a very difficult fish to work with,” Abrego said. “They were a new species (for hatchery production) and have their own requirements. It was not anything like working with red drum.”
TPWD's coastal fisheries hatchery staff have been working on flounder production for about five years, learning as they go.
Flounder typically spawn in the open Gulf of Mexico, where adult flounder spend the winter. It's a “free-spawning” event, with a female simply releasing eggs as a group of males circle her, releasing milt.
Wind and tide carry the buoyant fertilized eggs inshore, where the newly-hatched flounder find their way into estuaries. There, the young flounder hide, feed and grow.
Hatchery staff tried to mimic natural spawning conditions in hatchery tanks, allowing females to release their eggs and attendant males to fertilize them in open water. It didn't work very well.
“We had pretty low fertilization rates,” Abrego said.
Flounders' relatively low quantity of eggs and milt also were an issue. While an adult female redfish will release about a liter of eggs during a spawning session, an adult flounder releases only about 10 milliliters, Abrego said.
The amount of milt produced by adult male flounder, which invariably are much smaller than the females, is similarly modest.
To produce the highest possible number of fertilized eggs from the flounder held at Sea Center, staff recently switched to “strip spawning” — manually manipulating females and males to release their eggs and milt into a container, then mixing the two to produce fertilized eggs.
“It's labor intensive and it takes a lot of skill on the part of staff to do it right and not injure the fish,” Abrego said. “But it has worked really well. ”
Producing fertilized eggs and getting them to hatch is just the start. Raising the flounder to even fingerling size is fraught with obstacles.
“It's a very challenging process,” Bixby, who has worked on the flounder project for three years, said.
Tiny flounder are much more sensitive to water temperature than other species such as redfish, she said. From the time they hatch until they are about 10 days old, flounder fry require a very narrow water temperature.
“Water temperature has to be within a very tight range — 17-19 degrees Celsius (62.6-66.2 degrees Fahrenheit) — or the larvae won't survive,” Bixby said.
Other hazards await the young fish, even in the protected environs of a hatchery. When the young flounder grow large enough to switch from eating plankton and zooplankton to larger forage, their predator/carnivore character can prove fatal.
Young flounder are cannibalistic. Some of the fry develop faster than others.
“The big ones will eat the little ones,” she said.
To lessen this problem, hatchery staff regularly “grade” the fry/fingerlings, separating the young flounder by size to reduce cannibalism.
It takes about 75 days to get from fertilized eggs to inch-long flounder.
“We've been learning all these things — developing methods and techniques and technologies — as we go along,” Abrego said. “It's paying off. ”
This past week's stocking of flounder fingerlings into Galveston Bay was followed two days later by release of about 6,200 flatfish fingerlings into Sabine Lake, where TPWD's first stockings of hatchery-produced flounder (about 760 fish) occurred this past year.
Plans are for TPWD to increase the number of flounder fingerlings it produces, using new techniques and technologies staff is incorporating into the program.
Staff at Sea Center are planning to begin spawning flounder earlier in the year and aiming to get two spawns each fall/winter, greatly increasing the number of flounder available for stocking. The goal, Abrego said, is to produce 10 times more flounder for stocking next season than they did this year.
Producing flounder in hatcheries and stocking them into bay systems isn't a panacea for what ails the state's flatfish population.
“Stock enhancement — stocking fish — is just one of the fisheries management tools we can use to address the problems with the flounder fishery,” Abrego said. “It's not a silver bullet. But when you combine it with regulations and habitat enhancement and the other tools, it's a valuable part of the mix.”

[Ray]

Texas recreational anglers are playing an important role in efforts to increase state hatchery production of southern flounder, and state fisheries folks are looking to those anglers for additional help in collecting live flounder for use as brood stock.
“We have some really good public partnerships that help make a lot of our work possible,” said David Abrego, director of Sea Center Texas, the Lake Jackson hatchery and research facility where Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's flounder culture work is based.
Some of that help is economic. Some is more fun — catching flounder and donating them to the hatchery.
The Texas chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association has donated $30,000 to Sea Center for purchase of specialized equipment used in the flounder production project, and recently helped with the purchase of a specialized shallow-water boat to be used to help collect flounder brood stock and other on-the-water flounder program work.
Anglers participating in the Lute's Marine Chocolate Bayou fishing tournaments have provided the flounder stocking program with both money and sorely-needed live fish for use as brood stock.
The Lute's Marine events are “family-oriented tournaments for the not-so-serious fisherman,” said tournament organizer Bryan Treadway.
Along with donating a portion of entry fees to Sea Center's flounder program (about $2,000 over the past couple of years), the tournament focuses on providing TPWD with live flounder for use in the hatchery. Tournament anglers have provided about 100 live flatfish to Sea Center.
With four scheduled tournaments this year — the first set for April 24 — the Lute's Marine tournament hopes to provide even more live flounder to the hatchery, Treadway said.
TPWD can use those fish.
“We have about 300 brood fish, now.” Abrego said. “We want to get that up to about 600. That's where fishermen can really help us.”
Anglers who catch flounder, have the equipment (live-well, aerator) to keep them alive and are willing to haul the fish to the hatchery are welcomed to contact Sea Center (979-292-0100) and offer the fish to the program.

[Jordan]

ray... are u that bored.... ur starting to be like W and copy and paste information. its good information none-the-less...

[Salty]

Originally Posted by Jordan

ray... are u that bored.... ur starting to be like W and copy and paste information. its good information none-the-less...

Tax dollars at work.

[Ray]

I don't work for the govment or NASA.
I work for big oil..

[jpeff31787]

i didn't read the whole thing but thats pretty cool how they stocked an area with flounder! Wish they'd stock some frikin lakes with some black bass though not the stupid florida strain bass

[Ray]

Originally Posted by Deadly D

Ray how come you always come up with these long azz readings. I didnt read that much in school

I gots lotta time on my hands right now.

[Gottogo49]

Good read Ray, I wonder why Louisiana can't stock any saltwater fish. We have to pay more for a saltwater license and bass hatcheries are expensive to operate. Why not let those green trout guys pay their share. Oh never mind, The WL&f would probably make us buy a bass stamp in addition to our saltwater license. We got it pretty cheap compared to Texas anyway.

[Salty]

Originally Posted by Deadly D

Ray how come you always come up with these long azz readings. I didnt learn how to read in school

[Gerald]

“We have about 300 brood fish, now.” Abrego said. “We want to get that up to about 600. That's where fishermen can really help us.”
Anglers who catch flounder, have the equipment (live-well, aerator) to keep them alive and are willing to haul the fish to the hatchery are welcomed to contact Sea Center (979-292-0100) and offer the fish to the program.

I bet if they would get a marina to set up a tank or cage in the water so the fishermen could just put the fish in the tank....they could get all the flounder they need. The hatchery could come once a week and pick them up.

I guess that system would be to easy.

[SULPHITE]

Originally Posted by Gerald

I bet if they would get a marina to set up a tank or cage in the water so the fishermen could just put the fish in the tank....they could get all the flounder they need. The hatchery could come once a week and pick them up.

I guess that system would be to easy.

Good Idea...but you may see a coonass grabbing fish out of it for his limit!

[Ray]

We have plenty of Flounder in Big Lake. Plenty.