Student study unmasks sushi scandal in New York

A fourth of the fish for sale in New York City markets and sushi restaurants is mislabeled, a study launched by two high school students has found.

Cheap fish masquerading as fancy and endangered species disguised as eco-friendly have both been busted by the enterprising young scientists and a new technique called DNA bar coding, the New York Times said Friday.

Kate Stoeckle, 19, and Louisa Strauss, 18, collected 60 samples of seafood from four restaurants and ten stores in Manhattan, preserved them in alcohol and sent them to the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada for genetic analysis.

Stoeckle’s father Mark Stoeckle is an expert on birds and a proponent of DNA bar coding, a field developed since 2003, in which scientists use a single gene to identify a species rather than the entire genome, the daily said.

One evening, over dinner at a sushi restaurant, Stoeckle asked her father if the technique could be used on sushi, and a high school science project was born.

In Canada, Guelph graduate student Eugene Wong compared the DNA of the samples the young women sent him to a global library of 30,562 “bar codes” representing nearly 5,500 fish species, the Times said.

The DNA revealed that two of the four restaurants and six of the 10 grocery stores mislabelled their fish, the Times said.

Wong and biology professor Robert Hanner collected another 40 samples in Toronto and in Guelph.

“This not only raises concerns of consumer fraud, but also public health,” said Hanner, also associate director for the Canadian Barcode of Life Network, in a statement on the University of Guelph website.

“A person could have allergies to a certain species and if it’s mislabelled that could have dangerous consequences,” Hanner said.

Among the findings was Mozambique tilapia, a cheap fish that is usually farm-raised, sold as pricey white tuna. Flying fish roe actually came from the humble smelt, and seven out of nine fish labelled “red snapper” were not.

Atlantic Halibut, classified as endangered in the wild, was labelled and sold as Pacific Halibut, a species labelled a “best choice” for human consumption by environmentalists, the University of Guelph statement said.

“Consumers may think they are doing the right thing for the environment by buying a certain type of fish that is eco-friendly when really they could actually still be buying exploited species,” Hanner stressed.

Researchers have been working to identify and catalogue species from around the world using barcode technology and so far, more than 5,000 of the approximate 30,000 species of fish have been barcoded, the statement said.

The study will be published next week in the journal of Food Research International, the University of Guelph statement said.

From: UK Fishermen Dump Catch Overboard to Make More Money

The European Union put fishing quotas in place for a reason: to prevent the kind of overfishing that experts warn could lead to mass extinction of marine life in the coming decades. But, European fishermen aren’t pleased with the quotas because they limit profit possibilities. So to get around that, they’re doing something pretty horrifying: dumping tons of perfectly good dead fish back into the water. Fish that should never have been caught in the first place.

Recently, the Norwegian Coast Guard shot video of UK fishermen doing just this, and the sight of such wastefulness (a whopping 5 tons of dead fish) has shocked many people who didn’t realize the extent of what was going on. Check it out at The Guardian.

Read the full post at EarthFirst.com

NOTE: The practice is legal, as the EU only sets quotas for fish landed at ports, not what is actually caught at sea. In this case, it appears the fishermen were discarding low-value small (but legal) fish in order to fill their quota with higher-value big fish.

Comments are disabled on this post. If you would like to comment on this please do so at the original post on EarthFirst.com.

I saw this story yesterday on the BBC, which reports on the danger of collapse of bluefin tuna stocks, and didn’t cover it then because I thought it was the sort of thing that would get plenty of media attention. The fact that the not-terribly-environmentally-minded US is supporting a 3-5 year ban on tuna fishing in the North Atlantic says the situation is serious.

I am stunned to see today that when I put "tuna" into Google News, I got all of 5 articles on this issue (BBC, a New York Times editorial, Fish Update, the Telegraph, and the Edmunton Sun).

Readers may note that I have never advocated any particular pro-environment course of action, so I hope you will take this request seriously.