Snapper

Often not. Northern red snapper is a specific and heavily regulated species from the Gulf of Mexico and the southeastern United States, and demand for it vastly exceeds the legal catch, so substitution is rampant. DNA surveys of fish sold as red snapper in American restaurants and markets have found mislabelling rates ranging from roughly a third to nearly all samples, with the fish actually being other snappers, rockfish, tilapia, or entirely unrelated species. Buying whole fish, buying from reputable sellers, asking for the specific species name, and being sceptical of very cheap red snapper are the main defences.

Longevity is common in the snapper family and in reef fish generally, and it appears to be a strategy for coping with a variable environment. Recruitment of young snappers to a reef is unpredictable from year to year, depending on ocean currents and conditions, so a fish that lives for decades and spawns every year over that whole span is likely to hit several good years and contribute many surviving offspring across its life. The cost is slow maturity and slow population growth, which makes snappers, like groupers, easy to overfish and slow to recover, since removing the old fish removes most of a stock's reproductive capacity.

They are different families that share warm reefs and a reputation as top-quality food fish. Snappers, family Lutjanidae, tend to be more streamlined and torpedo-shaped, often forming midwater schools, with a sloping forehead and a set of prominent canine teeth at the front of the mouth. Groupers, in the sea bass family, are heavier-bodied, more solitary, and lie in wait in reef holes, feeding by explosive suction rather than pursuit. Both are slow-growing, long-lived, and vulnerable to overfishing, and both gather in large spawning aggregations, but a schooling, sharp-toothed fish in open water near a reef is usually a snapper, while a bulky loner in a hole is a grouper.

Snapper itself is a good food fish, but some large reef snappers in certain tropical regions can carry ciguatera, a toxin that builds up through the reef food chain from microscopic algae and is not destroyed by cooking. Ciguatera causes gastrointestinal and neurological symptoms and can be serious, and larger, older predatory reef fish, including some snappers, groupers, and barracuda, from known hotspot areas are the main risk. In most snapper fisheries, especially cooler-water and well-managed ones, ciguatera is not a concern, and local health advice identifies which species and areas to avoid where it is.