Big Changes at Small Fish

Small Fish, Big Apple is dead. Long live Small Fish, Big Red!

The holiday is over for me, I have accepted a job in Perth, Western Australia and left the Big Apple.
Perth is one of the most geographically isolated cities in the world. It is more than 2000 km from the next city of >1 million people. It is geographically closer to East Timor, Singapore and Jakarta, Indonesia, than it is to Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. According to Wikipedia, it is the antipode of Hamilton, Bermuda. Living here is going to be an interesting experience, I'm sure.

I'm working as an environmental scientist at a consultancy in Perth now. Some the clients of my new employer are in the oil and gas industry. Client sensitivity may affect what I can blog here from time to time. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Apart from the name change and geographical relocation though, the only thing that will change around here is the frequency of posting. Posts can take quite a while to compose, so it remains to be seen how that will fit in with a full-time job. I hope it won't slow me down too much.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here is a photo of my new city, taken on a beautiful spring afternoon.

Perth from Kings Park, Sep 2009.

Teenage DNA Detectives Expose US Fish Fraud

New Scientist magazine is carrying the story of two classmates from New York's Trinity School who collected 60 fish samples from fish stores and restaurants around New York. They then sent their samples off to the University of Guelph in Canada for DNA testing. Of 56 samples that could be identified by the DNA barcoding identification technique, 14 were mislabeled as an entirely different species.

"We never expected these results. People should get what they pay for," said Kate Stoeckle, 18, of the project with Louisa Strauss, 17.

In all cases, the fish was labelled as a more costly type, ruling out simple chance. In the worst cases, two samples of filleted fish sold as red snapper, caught mostly off the southeast United States and in the Caribbean, were instead the endangered Acadian redfish from the North Atlantic. The DNA of fish from a sushi restaurant called "white tuna" revealed the fish to actually to be Mozambique tilapia, a type of cichlid often raised on fish farms. One restaurant offered "Mediterranean red mullet" but the DNA matched spotted goatfish from the Caribbean.

I have highlighted this issue in previous posts here and here, but this is the first time I have seen such an excellent study showing what a widespread problem this is.

Buying Sustainably Harvested Fish - Not As Easy As I Thought

I like to cook, and I like to eat fish. Having just moved to New York from Australia has meant having to re-learn which of the fish varieties that I see on display down at my local supermarket are sustainable and which are not.

In Australia I would rely on the Australian Marine Conservation Society's Sustainable Seafood Guide. So I thought that I would look for a similar publication that was applicable to the USA. I found the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch site easily enough. Problem solved. Or so I thought...

A little further searching unearthed an article by Jennifer Jacquet (of Shifting Baselines) which describes how many illegally caught (or unsustainably raised) species are renamed as completely different species for resale in order to fool consumers who are trying to be responsible in their seafood choices. The examples she gives include Hake (labeled Tilapia), Red Snapper (75% of fish sold with this label are entirely different species), Shrimp (farmed shrimp labeled as wild-caught), Cod (labeled as Ling) and several others.

The EarthEasy Sustainable Seafood Guide gives the following tips for buying seafood:

• Try to choose shellfish grown on farms using racks, lines or nets which are suspended in the water. These methods minimize damage to bottom habitat during harvesting.
  
  
• Striped Bass, a well-managed Atlantic coast species, can be used as a substitute for some depleted species, such as Black Sea Bass, Rock Cod, Red Snapper, Grouper and Roughy.
  
  
• Farmed Crawfish make an excellent substitute for Lobster, which, although plentiful are often harvested at minimum size - before having a chance at reproduction.
  
  
• Ask your local seafood dealer or restaurateur about the source and catch-method of your seafood choices. Consumer concern is the best promoter of sustainable fisheries.

The problem is that guides such as this are only effective if the fish that a consumer is buying is correctly labeled. While this should be assured under consumer legislation and the FDA should work to enforce correct labeling, a study in 2006 found that the FDA was predominantly checking for the presence (not accuracy) of labels on food. That sort of checking would be unable to detect sneakiness such as we find with fish mislabeling. Clearly this is a problem currently in search of a solution. Until then I will be avoiding farmed fish, shopping from the Monterey Bay guide, and chatting to my fishmonger to see if he knows which fish can be guaranteed to be sustainably harvested.

UPDATE: This issue has been playing on my mind since I wrote this post, and I have started a series of posts about sustainability and the seafood industry. Part 2 of this series is here.