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.

New Regulation Would Lessen Influence of Fish and Wildlife Experts

The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been at the center of some of the fiercest environmental battles in the history of the United States. It has been the law which has held up big dams, helped bring iconic species such as the bald eagle back from the brink, and been used by environmentalists battling loggers over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. For these reasons the ESA is often demonised by those who prefer business as usual to biodiversity preservation.

The Bush Administration, with only a few months left in government, has just proposed a series of controversial rule changes to the ESA that would prevent the review of many new projects by biologists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

The departments of the Interior and Commerce have given two main justifications for the proposed rule changes. The first is to prevent the ESA from being used to regulate carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. That became a possibility after FWS listed the polar bear as a threatened species. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is reported as saying that:

...the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming...

The draft rules would bar federal agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.

The second justification given by the departments of the Interior and Commerce for the proposed rule changes is to reduce the number of "informal consultations" around the ESA. The consultations have caused considerable delays on projects in the past according to a 2004 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called the proposed changes illegal.

This proposed regulation is another in a continuing stream of proposals to repeal our landmark environmental laws through the back door," she said. "If this proposed regulation had been in place, it would have undermined our ability to protect the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the gray whale.

As the rules currently stand, when an action requiring a permit is proposed the permitting agency responsible must consider whether a listed species or its critical habitat might be affected by the proposed action. If the agency decides that a listed species or its critical habitat may be affected, then the agency must informally consult with staff at the relevant service (FWS or NMFS depending on whether it is a terrestrial or marine matter). If the agency or FWS/NMFS biologists decide that the action is likely to cause harm then a formal consultation is required. If the project is thought to be unlikely to cause harm to a listed species or its critical habitat however, then the agency may proceed with issuing whatever permits are required.

Under the proposed new rules, agencies have to consult the services only if indirect or direct effects of their actions are an "essential cause" of and "significant contributor" to the likely harm. Under the new rule, if the agencies determine that their projects are not likely to harm a species, they would not need to seek an expert opinion from the services at all. If the agencies suspect harm to a species, however, they still must formally consult. Officials at the departments of Interior and Commerce argue that agencies are "fully qualified" to decide on their own whether their projects will harm a species or its habitat.

This isn't the first action by the Bush administration to weaken the ESA. An analysis by FWS and NMFS of newly introduced regulations under the National Fire Plan (similar to those proposed under the ESA) was released in January. These regulations allow the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to decide whether to consult about prescribed burning and other fire-related actions. NMFS found that in 10 out of 10 cases:

• The agencies failed to describe spatial and temporal patterns of the action’s direct and indirect environmental effects, including direct and indirect effects of interrelated and interdependent actions;


• The agencies failed to identify Action Areas clearly;


• The agencies failed to identify all threatened and endangered species and any designated critical habitat that may be exposed to the proposed action;


• The agencies failed to compare the distribution of potential effects with the threatened and endangered species and designated critical habitat;


• The agencies failed to identify to establish, using the best scientific and commercial data available, that (a) exposure is improbable or (b) if exposure is likely, responses are insignificant, discountable, or wholly beneficial; and
• The agencies failed to base the determination on best available scientific and commercial information

FWS found other flaws in 25 out of 43 cases. It seems unlikely that removing the oversight provided by FWS and NMFS biologists from more projects that are likely to affect ESA listed species will do anything to improve these statistics. It seems immaterial whether agencies are "fully qualified" to decide on their own whether their projects will harm a species or its habitat if they have no will to protect those species and habitats.

The proposed rule is open for public comment until 15 September. From the FWS:

Submit your comments or materials concerning this proposed rule in one of the following ways:

(1) Through the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov. Follow the instructions on the website for submitting comments.

(2) By U.S. mail or hand-delivery to Public Comment Processing, Attention: 1018-AT50, Division of Policy and Directives Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service, 4401 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 222, Arlington, VA 22203. We will not accept e-mail or faxes.

We will post all comments on www.regulations.gov. This generally means that we will post any personal information you provide us."

Sustainable Seafood: Part 4 - Can sustainable seafood guides help protect the environment?

Part 4 in a series of posts about sustainable seafood.
Part 1 - This is the post that started me thinking about the problem.
Part 2 - Sustainable Seafood: Part 2 - What is sustainability?
Part 3 - Sustainable Seafood: Part 3 - How does sustainability relate to seafood?

I described in previous posts what sustainability is, and how it relates to seafood. In this post I want to talk about guides to buying sustainably produced seafood.

When we buy a product we become a party to the production of that product. When we choose one product over another, we are indicating that we think that the product we have chosen is better (in some way - appearance, quality, cost, environmental footprint etc) than the products that we didn't choose to buy. We can influence the behavior of the companies that make the products that we buy by making it more profitable for them to produce products in a way that we agree with.

Because I am concerned about the negative effect that humans can have on the natural environment, I like to choose products that are produced to minimize their environmental impact. One way I try to do this is by buying food that is produced as sustainably as possible - food that "...meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

As I mentioned in my first post on this topic, when shopping for seafood in Australia I would rely on the Australian Marine Conservation Society's Sustainable Seafood Guide to help me make seafood choices that weren't encouraging unsustainable fishing practices. When I moved to New York I found the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch site easily enough, and started using their Sustainable Seafood Guide to make sustainable choices when shopping.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium isn't the only organization which produces a sustainable seafood guide though - the following website all have guides to help consumers select seafood in a way that isn't contributing to damaging the natural environment:
Blue Ocean Institute
Earth Easy
Environmental Defense Fund
Seafood Choices Alliance
WWF
and I'm sure there are many more that I haven't listed too.

The problem is, even with a sustainable seafood guide in your pocket, it still isn't all that easy to make the right choices when you get to the supermarket. Not ony do you need to know which species you are seeing at the fish counter, but you also need to know how it was caught (long line, pole, purse-seine or trap?). Jennifer Jacquet (of Shifting Baselines) recently wrote an article describing 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 make sustainable 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. Several of the guides listed above also contain contradictory advice - species listed as an okay choice on some lists and a bad choice on others.

I experienced a case of deceptive labelling recently when I ordered scallops off the menu at a local restaurant. Ordinarily I only eat scallops if they were collected while diving by someone I know, because dredging for scallops disturbs large areas of the seafloor - especially when the scallops are collected by commercial fishermen in their large boats with enormous heavy dredges. The scallop dish on the menu at my local restaurant was advertised as "Fresh Diver Scallops" though, and when I asked the waiter he confirmed that, yes, they were collected by divers on scuba and were less than a day old.

When the scallops arrived they were large and sweet and delicious. So large in fact, that I asked another waiter where they had come from. This second waiter told me that they were actually from the Gulf of Mexico, and when I expressed surprise he said that they were dredged down there and then collected from the dredge by divers so that they could be sold as "Diver Scallops". This makes me really angry, for two reasons:
1: Because the fishermen were cynically continuing to destroy large tracts of seafloor while fishing, but were then acting in a sneaky fashion to avoid being punished by consumers for this bad behaivour; and
2: Because the restaurant was not only going along with this charade, but was cynically perpetuating the sneakiness on their menu.

What can consumers do when producers and retailers are cynically gaming the system like this? One organisation is attempting to solve this problem through detailed auditing of seafood products, from the ocean to your table. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an independent, global, non-profit organisation which was set up to find a solution to the problem of overfishing. They have developed an environmental standard for sustainable and well-managed fisheries. This standard was put together following worldwide consultation with scientists, fisheries experts, environmental organisations and other people with a strong interest in preserving fish stocks for the future. The MSC rewards environmentally responsible fisheries management and practices with a distinctive blue product label. If you see a product with the blue MSC oval on it, you can be fairly sure that that product is definitely produced sustainably. A list of all of the products certified so far, and where to buy them can be found on the MSC website.

Why should we have to rely on a charity organisation to tell us which products are sustainable though? Why aren't all of the products sold in modern first world countries produced in a sustainable manner? Whay aren't we all "...meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"?

Sustainable Seafood: Part 3 - How does sustainability relate to seafood?

Part 3 in a series of posts about sustainable seafood.
Part 1 - This is the post that started me thinking about the problem.
Part 2 - Sustainable Seafood: Part 2 - What is sustainability?

Sustainable Seafood: Part 3 - How does sustainability relate to seafood?
From MarineBio:

"Fish currently supply the greatest percentage of the world's protein consumed by humans. This fact may soon change, however, given that most of the world's major fisheries are being fished at levels above their maximum sustainable yield and many regions are severely overfished. More than 70% of the world's fisheries are overexploited, which threatens the health, economy, and livelihoods of communities all over the world."

The MarineBio website lists a number of issues that need to be addressed quickly in order to preserve fish stocks as a natural resource. Each of these issues is an example of unsustainable practices in the seafood industry. The issues include:

1. Overfishing;
2. Inadequate conservation and management practices;
3. Habitat loss as a result of harmful fishing practices; and
4. Government subsidies.

Each of these issues describes a different insult to the idea of sustainable fishing. Any one of these issues in isolation would be a cause for concern and a good reason to act to protect fish stocks. In many cases it is not just one of these issues that is affecting fish stocks however, but some combination of two or three or all of these issues working in parallel to meet the needs of the present while compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Overfishing
Overfishing can be defined in a number of ways. However, everything comes down to one simple point: Taking more fish than the system can afford to give up leads to an overall degradation of the system.

From a biological perspective overfishing occurs when fishing mortality has reached a level where the stock biomass has negative growth. Fish are being taken out of the water so quickly that the replenishment of stock by breeding slows down. If replenishment and immigration are insufficient to cover losses due to mortality and emigration then the population must decrease. As the population decreases, fishing has an increasingly significant effect on the remaining population. If fishing pressure does not decrease to allow replenishment to outstrip (or at least equal) mortality, then a fish population can crash to a point where replenishment is no longer possible. The ability of populations to recover also depends on whether the conditions of the ecosystems are suitable for population growth. Dramatic changes in species composition may establish equilibrium energy flows that involve other species compositions than had been present before (ecosystem shift).

Inadequate conservation and management practices
For generations we have believed the ocean to be pretty robust - probably because it is vast and under-explored; however, it is becoming increasingly obvious that ocean resources are finite, and depletion of these resources beyond sustainable levels is often irreversible. Overfishing not only causes depletion in individual fish stocks, but also disruption to entire ecosystems and food webs in the ocean. It is necessary to manage fisheries at the ecosystem level if we want to ensure the sustainability of fish stocks. This can be done by:

1. Maintaining populations of target species at levels that allow them to fulfill their natural role in ecosystems and enable positive (greater than mortality) rates of reproduction;
2. Eliminating the use of fishing gear that creates a high level of bycatch, or the incidental catch of nontarget species; and
3. Closing feeding, breeding and spawning grounds to fishing to protect marine ecosystems from exploitation at these sensitive times in their lifecycles.

Habitat loss as a result of harmful fishing practices
Eliminating destructive fishing practices is an essential step to bring sustainability to the seafood industry. Bottom trawling destroys habitats, indiscriminate fishing practices such as drift netting and long-lining are destructive to habitats and non-targeted species and lost or discarded fishing gear is also destructive to underwater habitats and ecosystems.

Deep-sea trawling is particularly harmful to ecosystems because it indiscriminately bulldozes or entangles many benthic species. Continued destruction of deep-sea areas is causing species to become extinct before they are even observed, let alone identified, by science. From SeaWeb:

"In a few hours, the massive nets that drag the bottom and weigh up to 15 tons, can destroy deep-sea corals and sponge beds that have taken centuries or millennia to grow. The trawlers target fish such orange roughy and grenadiers for food, and sharks for the cosmetic industry. These fish are generally long-lived, slow growing and late maturing so their populations take decades, even centuries to recover."

Government subsidies
To catch around $70 billion worth of fish per year, the commercial seafood industry spends approximately $90 billion per year and incurs total costs of over $120 billion per year. A multitude of government subsidies make up the difference between their income and expenditure. The practice of providing governmental support to the fishery sector is widespread among major fishing nations. While precise data are difficult to obtain, the basic facts are not considered controversial. Governments around the world are providing tens of billions of dollars in subsidies annually to the fishery sector, for a wide variety of purposes, and in many different forms. While smaller in absolute amount terms than, for example, subsidies to the agricultural sector, these payments are conservatively estimated to be roughly 20-25 per cent of the annual revenues of the commercial fishing industry.

Subsidized incentives make it easy for the seafood industry to build more fishing power than fish populations can support. There is now a mismatch between what the ocean can make and what the seafood industry can take, meaning that the seafood industry is currently meeting the needs of the present while compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Next:
Sustainable Seafood: Part 4 - Can sustainable seafood guides help protect the environment?

Sustainable Seafood: Part 2 - What is sustainability?

I wrote a post about sustainably caught seafood a few weeks back (available here), but this issue is still causing me considerable grief, so I thought that I would revisit the topic in a series of short posts summarizing the problem as I see it. Sustainable Seafood: Part 2 - What is sustainability? The concept of sustainability has been around for a long time. Now it is a buzzword which is often heard when people are talking about the environment and environmental degredation. It was a word which began seeping into the public conciousness in the late 1980's following the release of a groundbreaking report by the United Nations (UN). In 1983, the Secretary-General of the UN established the World Commission on the Environment and Development - also frequently referred to as the Brundtland Commission after Gro Harlem Brundtland, the head of the commission and former Prime Minister of Norway. The commission was tasked with examining the world's environmental problems and proposing a global agenda for addressing them. The Report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, was published in 1987. The Report is available in HTML format with links to cited documents, and an easy-to-read full version is available at the Center for a World in Balance. The report deals with sustainable development and the change of politics needed for achieving that. The Brundtland Report defined sustainable development in the following way:

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

This definition is well accepted and is usually the definition given today when dealing with issues of sustainability.

Next

Sustainable Seafood: Part 3 - How does sustainability relate to seafood?

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.