Presumably starry flounders behave similarly (I have not found a direct account).Ī female flounder can produce millions of floating eggs each season. Other flatfish have a very brief courtship then male and female swim together while the eggs and sperm are extruded. Starry flounders may live seven or eight years (or up to twenty-four years, according to some sources), spawning once a year. Sometimes, however, they (especially the juveniles) are also found in fresh water, even many kilometers from the sea.

They are near-shore fish, living in relatively shallow salt water (but sometimes over 300 meters deep) as well as brackish water. Starry flounders live in the North Pacific, Bering Sea, and the Arctic Ocean along the north coast of Alaska and western Canada. Then my ignorance asserted itself and announced that I know next to nothing about starry flounders and perhaps I should learn a bit about their life history. I have seen dippers catching very small starry flounders in Sheep Creek delta and in Switzer Creek. In this case, it led to who eats sockeye (bears, otters, eagles), particularly the eggs and juveniles (mergansers, Dolly Varden, dippers) and from there to dippers eating fish of other types, including little starry flounders. That simple observation led to one of those quick-time thought-chains that our brains do when we are not looking. I went to Steep Creek to check on the sockeye spawning run and found that the run seems to be quite small this year (so far, anyway). This time, the connections between the observation and the writing is more indirect.

I usually write about some observation that sparked my interest along the trails.

Big flat fish in alaska