I disagree, because the statute is about protecting fish and wildlife; protecting fish inherently implies protecting the environment of fish; water. There is obvious practical sense in defining fish to include any sort of animal that lives in the water, as all amphibians (including toads) do for at least part of their lives.
The court followed the law as it was written, which is good. And there is nothing inherently wrong with the law classifying all invertebrates as fish; many invertebrates are fish in the folk taxonomical sense, and there's no harm in accidentally pulling in wholly terrestrial vertebrates like bees.
But was the classification of bees as fish an accident? It doesn't matter; the law is what it is and the court decided correctly. But, nevertheless, we can still wonder whether it was an accident. I think it was. All the categories of animal categorized as fish by this law have a strong connection to water. What are they?
Crustaceans are sometimes terrestrial, but most are fish.
Amphibians are all characteristically aquatic early in life, and look like fish. Some remain aquatic their entire lives.
Mollusks are sometimes terrestrial (garden snails), but the majority of mollusks are aquatic and mollusks are the largest marine phylum, making up a plurality of all named aquatic animals. The mollusks people in America like the most, and consequently think about the most, are all seafood.
Invertebrates.. that's the contentious one. Technically, if not legally, invertebrates include all mollusks, as well as jellyfish, corals, sea anenomes, worms, etc. A whole lot of invertebrates are aquatic animals. It seems to me that if a well intentioned but busy lawmaker were trying to make a list colloquially defined fish (animals that live in the water), invertebrates could easily get roped into this list (along with toads, and terrestrial crustraceans.)
Notably missing from this list of fish are types of animals that are rarely or never aquatic; it doesn't list squirrels as fish probably because one does not think of water when they think of squirrels. But if the lawmakers had been prompted to think of beavers, perhaps they would have written rodents into their definition of fish.
Does or should it matter to the court? No, I don't think so. They should and did go by what the law said. But that doesn't mean HN commenters can't or shouldn't discuss what we think the lawmakers actually meant when they wrote this.
We're talking about the law that allows California to designate endangered species. The side of this case that lost tried to argue that California can't designate bees as endangered, because it lacks the authority to designate terrestrial invertebrates as endangered. As the decision points out: that's clearly false. The technical definition of "fish" was amended in the 1980s specifically to protect terrestrial invertebrates.
