If you decide to have shark for dinner in the U.S., you might unknowingly consume an endangered species. A newly published study shows that the meat of endangered sharks is often mislabeled in grocery stores around the country. The finding adds to the growing body of research showing how the mislabeling of seafood enables the sale of endangered species around the world.
Marine ecologists Savannah Ryburn and John Bruno at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill investigated the issue with their students, sampling shark meat sold across North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Washington, DC. In all, they collected 29 samples and found that they belonged to 11 species of shark.
Concerningly, three of those species—the scalloped hammerhead, the great hammerhead and the tope shark—are listed as Critically Endangered in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species. That’s the last step in the list before a species is considered “extinct in the wild.” Most of the samples they collected were generically labelled as
