Mislabeling Obscures the Sale of Threatened and Sustainable Fishes

Abstract

In response to our recent article, Stawitz et al. (2016), Mariani et al. (2017), Donlan et al. (2017), andWarner et al. (2017) raise important concerns about how our findings could be influenced by our conservation classification system, and potential conservation consequences of misinterpreting our conclusions. We respond here to emphasize our many points of agreement to clarify that our results should not be interpreted as an overall positive impact of mislabeling on conservation, and to argue that our overall conclusions are robust to data limitations. We discovered some errors in the original manuscript, which have now been corrected in that manuscript and are described in the Supplementary Information (S1) to this correspondence. We address statistical issues raised by Donlan et al. (2017) and Warner et al. (2017) in the Supplementary Information (S2). Finally, we highlight that this study is meant to provide a broad and first analysis; we agree that subsequent finerscale investigations will greatly inform our understanding of the ecological and financial impacts of seafood mislabeling.We do not suggest mislabeling benefits conservation, but rather that (1) the effect of mislabeling on conservation status varies across taxa, and thus, (2) mislabeling is not used consistently among labeled taxa to mask the sale of imperiled species. We found an overall difference in IUCN status between labeled and true items to be nearly zero (2-6% of an IUCN status), but also identified labeled taxa that were, on average, substituted with fish of greater conservation concern. Mislabeling is therefore likely to be of great consequence for some taxa, and managers should target these worst instances of mislabeling (e.g., by improving chain-of-custody tracking).We agree with Mariani et al. (2017) that we must use the metric of IUCN status carefully to evaluate species conservation status, but we demonstrate that accounting for their concerns still suggests that conservation consequences of mislabeling are mixed. IUCN status may overestimate the vulnerability of fishes by using biomass trends to assess status (Hutchings 2000) or underestimate vulnerability because stocks considered to be "collapsed" 788

Shining a light on seafood mislabeling through respectful debate

“…The original authors responded to the three rebuttals (Siple, Stawitz, Munsch, & Lee, ), emphasizing that their intention was not to suggest that mislabeling has conservation benefits, but rather that the implications of mislabeling should not be generalized as necessarily being bad (or good), and that the variety of causes and impacts of mislabeling should be considered in making management interventions. The rebuttals also forced the authors to not only clarify their conclusions and arguments, but also to reanalyze their data, and in doing so, they found some errors (Siple et al., ). The original contribution calls for increasing seafood traceability and value chain transparency as potential solutions to address seafood mislabeling.…”