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Somehow I think the fish have done quite well over the millenia without "owners."

Forsooth, but that was before people discovered how delicious they were.

Does Jesse know about your plan to enslave the altitudely challenged?

I prefer to call them "vertebrates of different..."

(...wait for it...)

"...aspirations".

Your analogy to whales is excellent. Many marine fish require a certain population density to survive. As long as that density is maintained somewhere the fish has a chance of rebounding. If it's uniformly reduced the fish faces extintion. Even after 7 decades of a fishing moratorium the whale populations of the North Atlantic remain miniscule. Imo migratory pelagic species like the cod and bluefish are most at risk. They can't survive in pods.

Here's a snippet from my past experience with a fishery collapse. It should help to explain why they call it a collapse. On one afternoon in 1993 I caught 26 5-7 lb. (mature) bluefish from a school of several hundred. They were from deep ocean and it was a lucky catch because bluefish had been declining in the area since the mid-1980s. In years after that I never caught more than one bluefish per trip. The schools of bluefish I saw were substantially smaller and made up of younger fish. The last school of blues I saw was in 1998, it was made up of about 5 2-lb.ers.

The ocean is big, fish need schools to feed, breed and survive. Bluefish feed in schools. They are quite intelligent and sophisticated hunters. When an area dies-off schools have to come from somewhere else to replenish stocks. The schools grow, then split-off into smaller schools. They don't grow from small groups. Unfortunately within the last 10 years foreign fisheries have 'discovered' bluefish and value it for it's high protein and fat content.