"Sure I am. I watch the Deadliest Catch. That counts, right?"
Beats me. I don't know what that is. Is that the equivalent of staying in a Holiday Inn?
Ok, for the most part, an exploitable fish species has to be both abundant and large enough to eat. Unless you are a whitebait fan, but the less said about that the better.
For a lot of reasons, that reduces your choices to deep water or cold water species. And even for them, there are only a limited number of species. Ever notice how orange roughy has become rare in the megamart? It used to be very common, but being a deep water/cold water fish it has a slow reproduction rate. So we have been harvesting beyond the maximum sustained yield. Now, the MSY is fairly easy to determine, but pretty difficult to enforce. Most commercial fishermen are the equivalent of subsistence farmers. They have made a huge investment, for them, in their tools of their trade. The fact that, for them, at some future date they won't have a trade isn't really relevant. They have to make their notes and put food on the table today. If that involves cheating, then so be it.
I can reference you to Sammy Ray. He tried to get the oyster fishery in Galveston Bay to be more rational. They refused. Net result, Galveston Bay is a lot less productive in oysters than they were.
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