September 26, 2025 — Many years ago, all fish were managed by politicians. The basic rule was that you could catch whatever you wanted, in whatever numbers that you wanted, of whatever size that you wanted, and you could do what you wanted with the fish—eat them, sell them, give them away, feed them to the tomatoes, or dump them back in the bay—because no law said otherwise.
Sometimes, someone would start to worry that a stock of fish wasn’t doing too well, or decided that some sort of net was killing too many fish (or, perhaps, interfering with another sort of net), or maybe one group of people decided that another group of people were killing fish that the first group wanted for themselves. Whatever the issue, and whoever the concerned group might be, the only way to change the status quo was to go to the state (or very, very rarely federal) legislature, and convince the politicians to pass a law imposing a bag limit and/or a minimum size, or outlawing a particular gear, or to have a species declared a “gamefish” so that commercial fishermen couldn’t kill any of them anymore, and anglers could kill all of them instead.
It was a difficult, time-consuming process, and the results often weren’t very good, because laws were too often passed based on emotion, or because a particular group of fishermen wanted all of the fish for themselves, rather than being based on sound science and a coherent fisheries management policy.
Even the legislators eventually recognized that, although they held the ultimate management authority, they generally didn’t know all that much about fish, and both the public and the resource were usually better off if they delegated management authority to fisheries professionals who had the expertise needed to conserve and manage fish stocks.
That didn’t mean that the politicians were completely out of the picture—they still could legislate management measures if they wanted to—but it did mean that fisheries management measures were generally based on something more than largely uninformed opinion, and that any regulations that were put in place had to be based on facts, and were not merely “arbitrary and capricious” actions based on some people’s whim.
For the most part, and for most people, the administrative approach to fisheries management works a lot better than the legislative one, but for those who are trying to do something that’s a little outside the mainstream, and maybe unsupported by any sort of data or objective facts, management by politician rather than by professional fisheries experts is still the preferred way to go.