February 19, 2020 — By his own account, Anthony DiLernia is a guy who can make friends with any angler. For 45 years he’s run a fishing charter boat out of New York Harbor, and he’s served as a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishing Council on and off for almost as long.

But get DiLernia on the subject of Paralichthys dentatus, aka summer flounder, aka fluke, and his voice gets territorial in a harbor kind of a way. What steams him are the wide variances in the amount the fish the federal government permits each state to catch. The uneven allocations are the reason that Southern fishermen routinely travel hundreds of miles to the waters off Long Island to trawl for fluke that local fishermen are forbidden to catch.

These state quotas, which are meant to prevent a species from being fished out of existence, are based on patterns of where the fish were brought in to docks in the 1980s. Back then summer flounder were clustered off Cape Hatteras, which explains, in part, how Virginia and North Carolina together get more than 50% of the annual quota, whereas New York gets only a little more than 7%.

But anyone who spends any time with a net knows warming waters have been pushing fluke steadily north. “You know all those critters who used to live down South? Guess what? They’ve moved to the Bronx,” DiLernia said.

“Our guys will be fishing right along their guys 80 miles off Long Island,” he said with indignation rising in his voice. “We catch more than a couple hundred pounds, and we have to throw the rest back—which is a total waste. Meanwhile, they are filling their freezer and driving back to North Carolina. With diesel fuel. What do you think that does to the environment?”

Read the full story at Bloomberg