"I think that maybe on the way home from wherever they caught these at, they just decided, ‘That’s a lot of fish. I don’t want to deal with all this work” — because that is a lot of fish," Doman said. "I have a feeling they thought: ‘This is just the Wild West where nobody is around. Dump them and not worry about it anymore.’"

Utah doesn’t have a limit on how many white bass an angler can catch; however, the species is protected and letting them go to waste is illegal. The state restitution fine for illegally dumping white bass is $10 per fish, which means the penalty, in this case, is $2,600. It also means it's a potential felony-level case, Doman explained.

While individual poaching cases involving big game might be more notable, trophy and non-trophy fish accounted for more than half of Utah’s 1,050 illegally killed animals in 2019. The number of fish found illegally dumped near Syracuse is almost the same amount as the 280 non-trophy fish illegally killed in all of last year.