In 2008, the season started on March 23 and ended on May 21 -- and the loss of four solid weeks of fishing, down to a two-month season, can be detrimental at best. In 2006, the NMFS also eliminated the fall flounder season completely. Bait shops and boat owners who relied on the flounder had to "sink or swim." (Continued)

From a biological standpoint, winter flounders have very little chance to make it to present legal-size limits. Flounders have one of the lowest survival rates in the sea. In New Jersey, one of their better spawning sites is in the Manasquan River. After the middle of February each year, thousands of flounders move into the river to spawn. In a good year, a flounder can lay thousands upon thousands of eggs in one spawn. But fewer than half of those will hatch to become fry.

Of those hatched flounders, about 30 percent get eaten or die before they can reach their first year.

At the same time when these fish are hatching, other species such as striped bass and bluefish are coming into the rivers to spawn as well. These fish take a devastating toll on flounder numbers. Many anglers have said they've seen striped bass with stomachs full of winter flounders.

If a flounder makes it past its first year, it will have less than a 50/50 chance at spawning in the same river where it was born. By the time a flounder gets to be two or three years old, it will be about 8 to 10 inches long -- still well below the legal size in New Jersey.

On the bright side, once a flounder does spawn, the number of eggs it can lay can almost double as the years go by. For example, say a flounder lays 20,000 eggs during its first spawn. At this point, the female flounder is just legal size. But if it doesn't die or get caught before the next spawning season, it can lay about 30,000 eggs.

But in fact, most flounders won't make it to their first spawn for any number of reasons. The odds are stacked against them.

Once a flounder hatches, it doesn't swim on the sea floor the way it does when you catch it. For the first year of its life, a flounder swims in the water column just like any ordinary fish. Not until one year later does one of a flounder's eyes migrate to the other side of its head and it starts to swim on its stomach.

Making the switch from one swimming pattern to the other is one of the crucial stages of a flounder's life cycle. During this time, it is very vulnerable and susceptible to predators. After it completes the switch to swimming on the ocean floor, it must avoid all the other predators that sift the sand in search of food.

Since the turn of the century, flounders' numbers have dropped severely along the East Coast.

Local factors such as overfishing, polluted waters and commercial fishing are among the top culprits in the species' decline.

Flounders are a tidal species, which means that they live in rivers and bays for most of their life. A top ecological factor in the plight of winter flounder is pollution. Rainwater sweeps into the rivers such harmful substances as lawn fertilizers, lead-based paint and other chemicals. This runoff ends up in rivers and bays and ultimately sinks to the bottom where the flounders live.

These chemicals get mixed into the dirt and mud where flounders inadvertently consume them. Other forms of pollution find their way to water sources and leach toxic chemicals into the water supply, thus killing more flounders in the process.

Natural predators have taken perhaps the largest amount of flounders in recent years. Almost everything in the estuary, including other flounders, eats baby flounders.