COASTAL OBSERVER

After the crowd left the site of a landmark event in the state’s management of its recreational fisheries, Aaron Watson stood ankle deep in a pair of leaky boots at the Murrells Inlet Boat Landing. He scooped up water in a five gallon bucket and poured it over the ramp.

Just below the water, hundreds of juvenile Southern flounder no bigger than a finger nail had settled onto the concrete.

Boat traffic was light, but Watson and other scientists who raised the 10,000 flounder released into the inlet last week weren’t taking any chances.

“It’s more stressful to have the flounder in the hatchery than to have them in the inlet,” said Erin Levesque, another member of the team at the state Department of Natural Resources that saw over 2 million larvae hatch this year.

Last week was the first release for a program that began in 2021 at the urging of state lawmakers to help the popular game fish recover. Along with more stringent catch limits, the state began a hatchery program that is the first on the East Coast.

DNR will release 98,000 flounder in Murrells Inlet and the Ashley River, the same amount that is released by the only other states with similar programs, Alabama and Texas. “They’ve been at this a lot longer,” said Blaik Keppler, deputy director of DNR’s Marine Resources Division.

The number of flounder recorded in the department’s annual survey fell by over 80 percent from the 1990s to 2017. Over 99 percent of the flounder catch in the state is taken by recreational anglers, and the number of saltwater fishing trips has grown by 144 percent since the 1990s, according to the department.

“It’s my understanding from DNR that 80 percent of the flounder catch in South Carolina comes from Horry and Georgetown County,” state Sen. Stephen Goldfinch told dozens of people who gathered at the landing for the release. “We are truly at the epicenter of flounder country.”

He and Rep. Lee Hewitt pushed for a stocking program.

“The response from DNR was, ‘You want us to do what?’” Hewitt recalled, adding that was under a different administration.

But while the state has a robust stocking program for other saltwater species, “the flounder are very different,” Keppler said. “They’re remarkably different.”

Flounder hatch like any other fish, but after about a month, they go through a metamorphosis. One eye migrates to the other side of their head, their bodies flatten and they develop camouflaged coloring. All that depends on the right water temperature, food and population density.

“Get any of it wrong and they don’t survive,” Keppler said.

In addition, DNR had to make sure that the hatchery fish didn’t have a genetic impact on the wild flounder.

The release last week and another scheduled for Murrells Inlet next month are the end of one process and the start of another. “Every aspect of today’s release is a scientific experiment,” Keppler said.

Tom Mullikin, the DNR director, said that’s what fishery management is about.

“It does not mean releasing fish and hoping for the best,” he said. “It means building a program that ensures every fish we release has the best possible chance of surviving in the wild.”

And that’s why Watson, the estuarine finfish research coordinator, stood pouring water from a bucket, helping to ease the flounder from the ramp into the deeper water as the tide rose.