Plaice names four flatfish—and Europe’s favorite dinner flounder
Plaice covers four flatfish species: European, American, Alaskan, and scale-eye. The European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa) is Europe’s principal commercial flatfish, also angled for sport, eyed for aquaculture, and kept in aquaria. The word comes via Anglo-French from Latin platessa and Greek platys, “broad.”
Four flatfish share the common name plaice: the European, American, Alaskan and scale-eye species. The word reached English in the 14th century through Anglo-French plais, from late Latin platessa for a flatfish, itself rooted in the Greek platys, broad. All four belong to the family Pleuronectidae, the right-eyed flounders.
The European plaice, Pleuronectes platessa, is the continent's leading commercial flatfish and, together with sole, forms Europe's most important flatfish group. Anglers pursue it, aquariums display it, and it shows promise for fish farming. It lives on sandy seabeds of the European shelf from the Barents Sea to the Mediterranean, down to about 200 metres, and is recognised by smooth brown skin with red spots and a bony ridge behind the eyes. It buries itself in sand by day and moves into shallows at night to eat worms, crustaceans and bivalves. Records reach 100 cm and 50 years. North Sea fishers have taken it for centuries with beam trawls, otter trawls and seines, but in the Celtic Sea it is considered overfished.
The American plaice ranges through the Atlantic from southern Labrador to Rhode Island and also occurs in Europe, where it is called rough dab. Brown or reddish, rougher-skinned and larger-scaled than its European cousin, it grows to 82.6 cm and 30 years, lives 90 to 250 metres down in water of about minus 0.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, and spawns in the Gulf of Maine, mostly in April and May. The Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization rates it overfished with no recovery in sight, though Canada's government considers it abundant; it makes up half of Canada's flatfish catch. It can also host a lungworm that infects young seals.
The Alaska plaice can live 30 years and reach 60 cm, though most caught are seven or eight years old and about 30 cm. Few fisheries target it, yet so many are taken as bycatch that the 2005 allowable catch in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands was used up before the end of May. The scale-eye plaice lives 18 to 900 metres deep in the northern Pacific, from the Sea of Okhotsk to Japan and Korea, reaching 46 cm and 1.2 kg.
Source: Plaice
