Recreational flounder season is underway in North Carolina, allowing anglers a brief two-week window to catch and keep the popular fish.
The state hopes to unlock more fishing opportunities next year by separating the season for southern flounder — which scientists believe has been overfished — from the season for North Carolina's two other flounder species, gulf and summer flounder.
That depends on anglers' ability to identify the differences between the species, which are all mottled brown flatfish.
Experts believe they can.
"It's easy and hard," state biologist Anne Markwith said. "For southern flounder, it's just blotches. They don't have the ocellated spots that summers and gulfs have."
Ocellated spots are also called eye spots, because they are dark in the center, like an eye. It's the most practical way to ID without keeping the fish out of the water for so long it dies.
"When they first come out (of the water), it should be easy to see those spots," Markwith said.
"Once we do a bit of angler education and people really look through the pamphlets and everything, I think that really helps clear it up," echoed state biologist Holly White.
Markwith and White head up flounder management at the state Division of Marine Fisheries.
The first ocellated flounder season is planned for spring 2026, they said. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the coalition that oversees summer flounder management, still must sign off on North Carolina’s plan.
Why is North Carolina so strict on flounder?
For decades, commercial fishers pulled in millions of pounds of southern flounder a year, with harvests peaking in the 1990s. Recreational harvests were always a fraction of that, typically a small one.
North Carolina is bound by a 1997 state law called the Fisheries Reform Act, which requires the rebuilding of fishing stocks that have been depleted. Those protections were triggered in 2017, when a multi-state stock assessment showed southern flounder were overfished.
"We're supposed to end overfishing in two years and have the stock rebuilt in 10," Markwith said.
The Division of Marine Fisheries has enforced strict flounder seasons since then, and commercial and recreational quotas more recently, to give the fishery a chance to stabilize.
Markwith said anglers are reporting seeing more large flounder.
"It is a shift, because even five years ago, they were saying, 'We can't catch a legal fish,'" Markwith said. "The problem is, at least on the coastwide assessment side, it's not picking that up yet. So we want to be very cautious with how we manage this fishery."
Over a million people fish recreationally in North Carolina, according to state data. Recreational fishing behavior is difficult to track and predict, unlike commercial harvests, which can be precisely monitored day-by-day.
That led to scenarios like in 2024, when the division had no recreational flounder season at all to make up for overages that had been caught the previous year.
"Doing a quota on the recreational side is a more novel approach," White said.
This year's two-week season is possible, in part, because of a vote in August to split the southern flounder catch 50-50 between recreational and commercial fisheries.
The Division of Marine Fisheries is currently reworking its southern flounder fishery management plan, and aims to pass new rules in 2027. A newly hired stock assessment crew will help, White said.
The 2025 flounder season began Sept. 1 and ends Sept. 14 in coastal and inland waters.
Anglers can keep one fish per day, though it must measure at least 15 inches.
