FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 493 



General range. — Shoal coastal waters off the eastern United States from Maine 

 to South Carohna, possibly to Florida,'^ and chiefly south of Cape Cod. 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — This is the commonest and commercially the 

 most important flatfish west and south of Rhode Island, but its range barely rounds 

 Cape Cod, and Cape Cod Bay seems always to have been the boundary to its regular 

 occurrence. North of this it is so rare a straggler that there is only one definite 

 record — for Casco Bay (specimens collected in 1873). We may add that we have 

 never seen nor heard of one caught in the inner part of Massachusetts Bay and that 

 it is unknown in the Bay of Fundy. 



The neighborhood of Provincetown is the most northerly locality where the sum- 

 mer flounder has ever been known to occur in abundance, but it was so common there 

 and along the inner side of Cape Cod as far as Wellfleet during the period from 1840 

 to 1850 that Captain Atwood carried them regularly thence to Boston and records 

 catching 2,000 pounds in a single afternoon inside Provincetown Harbor. However, 

 summer flounders so diminished in number after a few years of hard fishing that 

 Goode (et al., 1884, p. 175), writing in 1884, described them as "only occasionally 

 taken" there; and so far as we can learn they have never reappeared in any abun- 

 dance within the limits of the Gulf of Maine, a fact suggesting that the local body of 

 fish concerned was|not actually very large and that it received but few accessions 

 from the more abundant stock south of Cape Cod. Since Dr. W. C. Kendall 

 caught summer flounders at Monomoy and at North Truro in 1896, however, 

 occasional specimens are to be expected to round the tip of Cape Cod and to be taken 

 in Cape Cod Bay. 



The summer flounder occurs as far eastward as Georges Bank, offshore, where 

 Welsh saw some taken in otter trawls in 1912 (exact locality not given), but no 

 information is available as to its abundance there and it is probable that the 

 Eastern Channel is its boundary in this direction. Being of so little importance, 

 natural or commercial, in the economy of the Gulf we may pass over its habits 

 briefly. 



Habits and food. — It is a shoal-water fish, commonest in summer from tide 

 mark out to 8 or 10 fathoms, often caught in bays and in harbors where it lurks 

 among the piles of docks, and it runs up into fresh water in the mouths of rivers. 

 Summer flounders prefer sandy bottom, mud, or eelgrass, and they are frequently 

 seen lying covered all but the eyes in the sand, where it takes one but an instant 

 to so bury itself. When disturbed they are swift swimmers. 



This is a predaceous species like the halibut, feeding largely on small fish of all 

 sorts, on squids, and likewise on crabs, shrimps, and other crustaceans, small shelled 

 mollusks, worms, and sand dollars. It is very fierce and active in pursuit of prey, 

 often following schools of fry or sand eels right up to the surface, to jump clear of the 

 water in its dashes, actions very different from those of the sluggish plaice or winter 

 flounder. In the northern part of its range it moves out from the shallows into 

 deeper water in winter, no doubt to avoid the cold, June to October being the fishing 

 season along shore — hence its common name. It is not known whether the summer 



" Florida is usuall7 given as the southern limit of this Sounder, but it is possible that the early records from that State (there 

 are no recent ones) actually referred to the "southern flounder " (P. lethostigmus), a common Floridian fish. 



