Endangered
American plaice
Hippoglossoides platessoides
The American plaice, American sole or long rough dab is a North Atlantic flatfish that belongs, along with other right-eyed flounders, to the family Pleuronectidae.
Appearance
In the northwest Atlantic (H. P. Platessoides) it ranges from Greenland and Labrador to Rhode Island, and in the northeast Atlantic (H. P. Limandoides) it ranges from Murmansk to the English Channel, Ireland and Iceland, rarely finding itself in the Baltic Sea.
Range and habitat
In the Gulf of Maine spawning peaks in April and May.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
The species is considered by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization to be overfished, with no signs of recovery. Canadian officials dispute this, claiming the population is under less than 20% risk of extinction in the next 80 years even so, it remains under the moratorium established in 1993. A 1997 study reports that plaice are endangered in Canada due to overfishing.
In its European range, the species is generally common and not actively sought by fishers, but it is often part of the bycatch.
American plaice is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on American plaice, Wikidata item Q1234702. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
