WHEN is a red snapper not a red snapper? When it appears on your dinner plate in the US.
Lutjanus campechanus is often rated as the best-tasting and most highly priced gourmet fish in the US, but according to a survey three-quarters of the fillets sold as red snapper actually come from similar, but gastronomically inferior, species. 鈥淢ore often than not, people are not getting what they think they鈥檙e paying for,鈥� says Peter Marko of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Marko analysed DNA from a selection of 鈥渞ed snapper鈥� fillets bought in eight US states, and found that a quarter actually came from the related species vermillion, lane and crimson snapper. And half came from species that either live in foreign oceans or are so rare they were impossible to identify (Nature, vol 430, p 309).
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The US Department of Commerce and Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council declared in 1996 that red snapper was being overfished in the western Atlantic. Marko says continuing intense demand in the US is prompting fishermen and fish suppliers to cast their nets more widely and catch, and mislabel, similar-looking, but little-known species. 鈥淚t鈥檚 driving a shift to catching rare species we don鈥檛 know anything about, and that was the most worrisome thing,鈥� he says.