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MEXICO CITY — A new study by ocean conservation group Oceana has found that over one third of all seafood sold in Mexico is not the species it claims to be, with researchers describing the findings as “alarming” and marine biologists describing them as “a lot to process before lunch.”

The report’s most striking finding concerns marlin, which was substituted at a rate of 91% and replaced in multiple cases with shark species currently listed as endangered. This means that during Lent, customers who ordered marlin, a large, commercially fished billfish of no particular conservation concern, were instead served — at a markup — a protected animal whose continued existence scientists are actively trying to secure, by restaurants that apparently decided the most efficient response to marine conservation law was to charge extra for violating it.

Red snapper, meanwhile, was found to have been substituted with up to 16 different species — a finding that raises the question of what, precisely, a restaurant means when it writes “red snapper” on a menu. Researchers concluded it means, broadly, “fish.” It may be one of 16 fish; it will not be red snapper.

The menu is, in this sense, less a list of available dishes than a starting point for a conversation the customer does not know they are having.

Perhaps most philosophically troubling is the situation in Mazatlán — one of Mexico’s premier fishing ports. Here, boats leave at dawn and return with fresh Pacific seafood that is unloaded onto the dock, sold to vendors, transported to restaurants and yet somehow arrives on the plate as tilapia — a freshwater species farmed primarily in inland tanks. Its presence in a coastal Pacific seafood restaurant represents either a supply chain of remarkable ambition or a substitution so brazen that it has lapped itself and become something approaching performance art.

Oceana is calling for a national seafood traceability standard. The tilapia was unavailable for comment, possibly because it was busy being sold as something else.

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