By: Lynn Mattes

In 2025, based on a suggestion from Rachel on the Outreach Committee, each month we will be highlighting an “Underwater Wonder.” Each member of the Board of Directors and the Outreach Committee will highlight one of their favorite marine/aquatic organisms. The critter featured may be the topic of current work, grad school work, or just something that one of us thinks is cool or interesting. At the end of the year, we may have a vote to see which organism is the favorite of this group.

I volunteered to kick the year off and highlight one of my favorite fish, the starry flounder. That exercise brought me a couple of days of unexpected joy. In my current job, I do about 50% fisheries policy and 50% program/project administration. I rarely get to do anything that I consider “biology” anymore, just a product of moving up in my agency. Therefore, being able to double check and compile some information on one of my favorite fish species brought me quite a bit of joy over the last couple of days. I was so into what I was doing that before I knew it I had several pages of text penciled out when all I needed was 3-4 bullet points for an infographic. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed researching and learning about fish, their biology, life history, habitat, etc.

Since I had extra information compiled, I wanted to share some of it, and continue my joy.

Starry flounder (Platichthys stellatus), a master adapter

Starry flounder was one of the four species of flatfish that were the subject of my master’s work on habitat utilization by flatfish in an urban glacial-fed wetland. Starry flounder was the most commonly caught of those four flatfish species. We even managed to catch several on one otter trawl tow when the net had deployed upside down.

Starry flounder are easy to identify by the yellow and black bands on the dorsal, anal, and caudal fins, as well as the star-shaped plates, or tubercles, along their eyed side, from which they get their common name. Their rough skin and the “stars” make them tough to fillet, dulling knives and machines quickly.

Starry flounder are able to adapt to a wide variety of temperature, salinity, and oxygen conditions. They can be found in estuaries,  tide pools, 100+ miles up freshwater rivers, and out to 100+ fathoms in the ocean. 

I personally have seen adults (~2.5 feet ) caught by a flatfish trawler on the Albatross Bank off Kodiak Island, AK in 50-60 fathoms of water.  I also routinely encountered juveniles (2-3 inches) in small isolated frozen-over puddles in the Mendenhall Wetlands near Juneau, AK.  Their ability to withstand cold temperatures in particular is due to a number of proteins they produce that act as antifreeze.

In my thesis work, I found that juveniles travel up the shore as the high tide moves in to graze on bivalve siphons, polychaetes, shrimp, amphipods, and pretty much anything else they come across. Then, they retreat back to deeper water as the tide goes out.

Though they belong to the right-eyed flounders (family Pleuronectidae) they can be either right- or left-eyed. The proportion of left-eyed individuals vary by location: from California to Puget Sound, they tend to be 50-60% left-eyed, increasing to 66% throughout Alaska, and near 100% off Japan. 

Starry flounder are tasty; however, as mentioned above, they can be tough to fillet. There have been commercial fisheries in the past for them, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area, but are more of a bycatch than target these days. In the 1960s through 1980s, there was a very popular recreational fishery in many estuaries along the US West Coast. However, that fishery has died down since the early 1990s, with some anglers attributing it to the increase in the harbor seal population, who also have a taste for flounder. The true cause of the decline is likely due to a combination of factors and not just the rise in the seal population.

Thank you for letting me share information on an aquatic organism that I find fascinating; and going into 2025, I want to quote a social media account I have come across, “Find Your Joy!”