Web site offers eating

advice on seafood

A few days ago, I went out to dinner with several friends. One ordered scallops and another ahi. I picked mahimahi.

As the waiter served our meals, a pang of guilt struck me. On my desk lay an article stating that in the last 50 years, industrial-scale fishing has caused a whopping 90 percent decline in top-of-the-food-chain fish.

Should we be eating tuna and mahimahi? I wondered. Or any fish at all? What about scallops and other invertebrates?

To find some answers, I went to www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp. This site features Seafood Watch, a program designed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium to help us make informed decisions about seafood. Among the wealth of information on this site is a printable reference card we can carry in our wallets.

The card doesn't solve all the fishing problems in the world, but it does provide good information. With it and its Internet links, seafood lovers can learn what researchers at this institution recommend we eat and how they came to their conclusions.

The card lists seafood in three groups: Best Choice, Caution and Avoid. So when you go to a restaurant and the waiter tells you the chef's special is monkfish, you can whip out your card and then order something else. (Monkfish is on the Avoid list.)

My mahimahi landed in the Caution column for two reasons. One is that no stock assessment of this species exists, meaning no one knows its abundance.

This is important because mahimahi is in growing demand.

Once popular only with sport fishermen, this fast-swimming, open-ocean fish is now receiving attention from commercial fishermen. How long that can go on before they damage the stock is currently anyone's guess.

Another negative for mahimahi is that it's caught on longlines. This method of fishing uses lines up to 50 miles long with thousands of baited hooks. The hooks catch unwanted fish, called bycatch, and other animals that usually perish before fishers can release them.

Hawaii's black-footed albatrosses are currently dying in droves by diving on the bait put out by longliners.

Some ahi, or yellowfin tuna, are also longline-caught and therefore rank in the caution zone. Pole-caught and troll-caught ahi, however, get a green light as a Best Choice.

Scallops rate caution on the seafood card because they're often caught by dredging, a fishing method that drags heavy nets along sandy sea floors. Farmed and diver-caught scallops are OK, but watch out for those farms, Seafood Watch warns. Most of the bay scallops sold in the United States come from aquaculture facilities in China, a country with questionable farming practices.

One big problem with Seafood Watch is figuring out how and where the creature you order, or buy, got caught or raised. For instance, Pacific halibut is OK; Atlantic halibut is not. You can feel good about eating wild-caught Alaska salmon, but not farmed salmon. Farmed caviar, however, is fine, but don't go for its wild counterpart.

I don't agree with every recommendation on the card (that's another column), but I think the idea is great. Fish are in trouble because so many of us can afford to eat them even when they get scarce and expensive. Anything that helps us be more responsible consumers helps marine life.