Fisheries Research 129–130 (2012) 106–109 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Fisheries Research jou rn al h om epa ge: www.elsevier.com/locate/fishres Inaccurate labelling detected at landings and markets: The case of European megrims Victor Crego-Prieto a,∗ , Daniel Campo b,1 , Juliana Perez a , Jose L. Martinez a , Eva Garcia-Vazquez a , Agustin Roca a a University of Oviedo, Department of Functional Biology, C/Julian Claveria s/n, 33003 Oviedo, Spain b University of Southern California, Molecular and Computational Biology, 1050 Childs Way, RRI, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2910, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 19 March 2012 Received in revised form 22 June 2012 Accepted 25 June 2012 Keywords: Flatfish Fisheries Mislabelling Lepidorhombus boscii Lepidorhombus whiffiagonis a b s t r a c t Many marine stocks are endangered by inadequate or unreported exploitation, and mislabelling can enhance the problem. We focused this work on two morphologically similar marine species that are caught together in mixed fisheries, the European common megrim (Lepidorhombus whiffiagonis) and the four-spotted megrim (L. boscii). We sampled 239 megrim individuals directly from landings from five different points of Spain, the world’s main consumer of megrim, and 264 megrims from five different markets. Samples were genetically analyzed and identified with a species-specific marker. We found that 40% of megrims were incorrectly labelled at landings, and this mislabelling error increased to 60% at markets, the highest values ever reported for fish and shellfish. In addition, although most landings across Europe (90%) were identified as L. whiffiagonis, genetic results showed that only 49% belonged to this species and the rest were L. boscii suggesting a unidirectional mislabelling. Erroneous identification of fish catches leads to inaccurate estimates of exploitation and, if prolonged over time, can contribute to the exhaustion of stocks and loss of genetic diversity. Our results highlight the urgency of a separate management plan for each megrim species in markets and the need to apply currently available molecular markers if visual methods are not good enough for species identification. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Stocks of many aquatic species become endangered (Hutchings, 2000) due to the increasing need for food while humankind contin- ues growing (www.fao.org). Some examples are sharks (Baum et al., 2003; www.iucnredlist.org) and bluefin tuna (Safina and Klinger, 2008). In 2008, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in its biannual report (www.fao.org/docrep/011/i0250e/i0250e00.htm) estimated that half of the world’s fisheries are at maxi- mum exploitation and another quarter are over-exploited or depleted (as also is revealed for example in Myers and Worm, 2003). A recovery trend was shown in the 2010 FAO report (www.fao.org/docrep/013/i1820e/i1820e.pdf) for some stocks due to improvements in management (e.g. blue whiting, Arctic cod or Greenland and Atlantic halibut), but many other species (e.g. dif- ferent tuna species, Atlantic cod, and some hake species) remain overexploitated. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 985102726. E-mail address: victor.crego.prieto@gmail.com (V. Crego-Prieto). 1 Tel.: +1 213 821 2858. Illegal and unreported fishing occurs in a large number of species (Agnew et al., 2009) and certainly contributes to overexploita- tion. However a solution is not easy and requires internationally concerted efforts for monitoring fishing grounds (Sumaila et al., 2006). Besides IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing, other factors that can lead to inadvertent overfishing include the inaccurate estimation of exploitation rates, which may represent a major obstacle for developing sustainable management guide- lines. Mislabelling is one of the factors involved in underreported exploitation of stocks and could threaten the sustainability of fish- eries contributing to the depletion of fishery resources as occurs for example in the Patagonian toothfish Dissostichus eleginoides (Marko et al., 2011), the European common skate Dipturus batis (Iglésias et al., 2010), and different hake species (Garcia-Vazquez et al., 2012). Incorrect identification of fish species causes incorrect quantification of catch at landings and consequently leads to inac- curate estimates of exploitation rates. Taxonomic confusion is more likely when two species are morphologically similar, like the above cited common skate, which actually are two different species, the blue skate (provisionally called D. cf. flossada) and the flapper skate (D. cf. intermedia; Iglésias et al., 2010), some sharks (Clarke et al., 2006; Boomer et al., 2010), North American (Garcia-Vazquez et al., 2009) and African hakes (Garcia-Vazquez et al., 2012) and others. 0165-7836/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fishres.2012.06.017