Virginia Marine Resources Commission

And, you know, the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries sets these quotas.

Yet, but Virginia, the VMRC, Virginia Marine Resources Commission has, and the state of Virginia have the authority to reject the quotas that are set by the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission.

However, the quotas for Virginia are rubber stamped, identical to what the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission establishes as the official formal quota that they accept.

and Virginia Marine Resources Commission is accepting that quota without any science to confirm that that's a sensible, sustainable, reasonable way to manage the fishery.

There's more discussion about the damage that blue catfish are causing to the bay ecosystem than there is of the discussion of the damage that industrial menhaden fishing is doing.

So yeah, there could be a lot.

I mean, Virginia and the VMRC rejected what I thought was a very reasonable effort to let's try and remove all these giant blue catfish.

And the governor of Virginia vetoed a law that would have uh allowed people to keep all their large blue catfish instead saying we want to let we're going to let you keep 132 inch blue catfish because we want the rest of them in there to uh reward the sport fishing industry so it's kind of like craze like you know what i mean you figure you and i would probably agree i'm not pretending to be a scientist on this one but a bigger giant blue catfish probably does more damage than a little one and that's the one we're preserving When I say we, Virginia.