The !@#$%^! government CLAIMS that they “stepped in”because of OVERFISHING.
Here in TX they did the same with our local BULL REDS - That’s where the “slot limit” & the “ONE TROPHY RED per fisherman per year” came from.
(NO shortage of BULL REDs here & hasn’t been, ever.)
We can thank the ODUMBO coven of far left MORONS & FOOLS for such utter NONSENSE.
(NOW, we have TOO MANY SEALS & thus TOO MANY White Sharks, too.)
Yours, TMN78247
Started LONG before Zer0 was even on the radar. From Wiki
The NMFS received the authority to conserve ocean wildlife through the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.[30] In 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, commonly referred to as the Magnuson–Stevens Act, gave the NMFS the authority to manage marine fish stocks, creating eight regional fisheries management councils to oversee fisheries,[30] and the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 amended the 1976 legislation by making changes to authorize new ways of replenishing depleted fish stocks.[30] In 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006, which updated the Magnuson–Stevens Act with deadlines to end overfishing, increased use of market-based management tools, the creation of a national saltwater angler registry, and an emphasis on ecosystem approaches to management.[30]
Seats on the various regional fisheries councils were prime patronage positions, and like ALL gov't. institutions, it just began to mushroom and become corrupted to the point of total idiocy we see today. But various bureaucrats have their kingdoms and they WILL NOT be encroached on. So unless the whole thing is scrapped and redesigned by people who actually KNOW something, we can expect more and more mis-management.
I don't know what they're doing today, but in its early years the NMFS took no note of the cyclical nature of inshore fish stocks. Weakfish (similar to your sea trout, but a LOT bigger) are a case in point. I was an avid fisherman growing up, had heard about the grey hoards of weaks that used to thrive around LI, but had never seen one. Then in the early 70s those hoards returned....for a couple of years.....then they fell off sharply.
NMFS to the rescue with all kinds of regs. (when your ONLY tool is a hammer, everything is a nail) The FACT that weaks are cyclical, dependent on eel grass to hide the young of the year class from predation and that said eel grass beds for whatever reasons had shrunken was never considered.
........and so it goes.....
(sorry for the delay, Suddenlink sux!)