Recent technology that identifies varieties of fish by their gene sequences has shown that 20-25% of seafood products are mislabeled, usually with something cheap being labeled as something more expensive.
Dana Miller, a doctoral student who worked with Dr. Mariani in Dublin studying the mislabeling of cod, the most popular fish in Ireland, said, “we expected with all the policies and legislation and inspections, the numbers would be pretty low.” But 25% of samples of fresh cod and haddock and over 80% of the smoked products, were in fact something else. Irish cod stocks are overfished.
If you can’t trust the name of the fish on the package, how can you trust anything else about what the label says? The group Cleanfish is experimenting with an electronic tagging system through which each fisherman or processor would enter his code onto a tag on each fish, making its journey from the sea to the plate fully transparent.
Moon jellyfish have increased, thanks to climate change and overfishing, and appear as white swaths in this Japanese bay. better get used to the taste of jellies after our protein-rich fish supply runs out!
Orangutans living in Borneo scavenge fish that wash up along the shore and scoop catfish out of small ponds for fresh meals, anthropologist Anne Russon of York University reported . Over two years, Russon saw several animals on these forested islands learn on their own to jab at catfish with sticks, so that the panicked prey would flop out of ponds and into a red ape’s waiting hands.
“If orangutans can do this, then early hominids could also have practiced tool-assisted fishing,” Russon said.
