So if you want to fish for lobster commercially in California, you can expect to pay about $100-150k for the permit. They're damn near hereditary. Also, about that lucrative. I've heard of fishermen sitting on one or two of them (in addition to their own) to keep them out of the hands of competitors. Yeah. It's worth a couple hundred thousand dollars to reduce the number of people competing for your catch.

If you want to fish for hagfish commercially in California, you can expect to pay $140 a year. Nobody wants them. Thus, a friend of mine determined that he was going to make his fortune trapping hagfish for export to Japan and Korea. That whole "live catch" thing is nice an'all but hagfish are a bitch to ship. Far better to freeze them immediately and launch 'em via container where they're converted to "eelskin leather."

The price differential between lobster and hagfish is a factor of a thousand because nobody wants to fish for hagfish. The slime, I hear, is completely unreal. And lobsters are no walk in the park.

My buddy gave up after a season.