What you see is not what you get: DNA barcoding is helping scientists unveil nature's most hidden diversity

Any chef in town knows what Lutjanus campechanus, also known as the red snapper, looks like. It is a pricey, medium-sized, light-red fish that weighs about 10 pounds. You may enjoy it fried, baked, broiled, poached, or sautéed. But what the chefs don’t know is that about 77% of red snappers sold in the United States are actually a mix of different species that includes some not-so-appreciated and rare reef fish (1). That’s because some snappers look very much alike, making it difficult to sort them based on appearance. Besides being a possible theft against consumers who pay too much for ordinary reef fish, the mislabeling results in deceptive stock sizes of L. campechanus, with several implications for resource management.