Flatfish

Yellowfin Sole / Market Overview

Yellowfin Sole (Limanda aspera)

Yellowfin sole are the most abundant flatfish in the eastern Bering Sea. They inhabit the eastern Bering Sea shelf and, in small part, the Aleutian Islands region. They are also found off British Columbia, Canada; north of the Bering Sea; and in the Sea of Japan along the Asian coast.

Foreign fisheries exploited yellowfin sole in the early 1960s, when catches averaged about 400,000 t. As a result, annual catches declined to about 100,000 t through the late 1960s to 50,000 t in the 1970s. Abundance increased in the 1980s, with a biomass high of 227,000 tons recorded in 1985.

The fishery became fully domestic in 1991 with the cessation of joint venture fishing operations and is currently regulated under the BSAI Groundfish Fishery Management Plan (FMP) in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands (BSAI) area. Yellowfin sole are also included in the shallow-water flatfish complex in the Gulf of Alaska Groundfish FMP. Harvests are constrained by halibut and crab bycatch limits, a 2 million metric ton cap, and various FMP restrictions.

Since 2003, all caught yellowfin sole must be retained for processing. In 2008, Amendment 80 to the FMP allocated yellowfin sole among trawl fishery sectors and facilitated the formation of harvesting cooperatives in the non-American Fisheries Act (non-AFA) trawl catcher/processor sector.

Currently, yellowfin sole are abundant, with the U.S. responsible for the majority of the worldwide catch.

Data sourced from National Marine Fisheries Service (www.nmfs.noaa.gov)

Facts

Yellowfin sole are flatfish with eyes narrowly placed on one side of their bodies. Their eyed-side is olive to dark brown with dark mottling and their dorsal and anal fins are yellowish. They are primarily caught with bottom trawl gear over soft, sandy bottoms.

A relatively slow growing and long-lived species of fish, yellowfin sole occupy separate winter, spawning, and summertime feeding distributions on the eastern Bering Sea shelf. From over-winter grounds near the shelf margins, adults begin a migration onto the inner shelf in April or early May each year for spawning and feeding.