News

An Australian survey has revealed a serious problem with mislabelling of seafood products.  More than 10% of retail and food-service samples tested were found to be mislabelled as to their species.  Shark and ray products had the highest occurrence of mislabelling at 35.9%. A specific issue was the mislabelling of protected species.  DNA barcoding revealed that in 18 instances, products incorrectly labelled as "flake" – or to a lesser extent as "shark" – were in fact holocephalians (i.e. chimaera fishes).  1 sample of spotback skate was mislabelled as "stingray" and 1 sample of school shark mislabelled as "gummy shark", both of which are critically endangered.  In total, 672 samples from supermarkets, fishmongers and restaurants were sampled across seven Australian states.  The study, by the Perth-based Minderoo Foundation (a privately-funded sustainability campaign group) was published in Nature and has been picked up by the media (example here)