Capt. Mark P. wrote: "The reasoning behind (the commericials favoring.) higher limits
is steeped in science that tells us that if you pretect the juveniles, higher spawning biomass will
result and the growth we saw here is inherent proof of that." It could easily be argued that it was the desire of the commerical fishermen to want to keep the price of fish high, prevent the quota from being reached too quickly and prevent a lot of "amat
uers from being able to muscle in on their turf by catching fish at 28" and selling them. The science actually says that if you take the large breeders out of the mix, there won't be any large fish at all after a while. You might have lots of small ones
and no real large ones. The reasoning behind the 38 and 36 inch limits was that there weren't that many fish in that size class left and that the chances of catching a lot of them were slim. When the year classes began to recruit large numbers of fish in
those size ranges, the size limit should haev gone down to keep those breeders in the mix and to exploit the heavier-populated year classes. This didn't happen and now we have a mess, where the year classes are all out of whack. A coast-wide slot limit wh
ich could be adjusted yearly to exploit the predominant year classes might work, but you'd have a hard time getting maryland and North carolina to agree to it.