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As an environmentally focused, applied field science, fisheries biology has recently been marked by its failed promise to enable sustainable exploitation. Fisheries biology's origin through state support raises many questions. How did fisheries biologists get this support? Did political considerations and economic ideals fundamentally shape the science? Why has it been perceived as fundamentally conservation oriented? New evidence indicates the political basis for Thomas Henry Huxley's contention that the deep-sea fisheries were inexhaustible; this essay shows how his influence extended to recent neoliberal resource management solutions. It also explores how fisheries biology acquired the ideal of maximum sustained yield (MSY) via Progressive Era efficiency conservation and German scientific forestry; how American Cold War foreign policy made this ideal paradigmatic of mid to late twentieth-century fisheries biology; and how emerging bioeconomics in the 1950s imposed a troublesome misunderstanding of fisheries biology's earlier mission.

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By leading the Canadian Fisheries Expedition of 1914–1915 Johan Hjort took the opportunity to do far more than just survey herring, other fish stocks, and the hydrography of Canadian Atlantic waters. He also attempted to improve the backward fish-processing technologies used in the local fisheries, an agenda blocked by the Canadian government. Hjort did succeed markedly, however, in introducing Canadian scientists to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea's new scientific methods for fisheries research. He and his colleagues offered training in the new dynamic oceanography as well as population demographic studies and biometrics for studying fish populations, races, and other units. His extroverted leadership-initiated lasting linkages between Canadian and Scandinavian scientists, and created an international network of fisheries biologists.

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