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The next time you're perusing a menu and feel like ordering some tasty fish—an expensively-prepared piece of red snapper, say—you might want to bear in mind that what arrives on the plate won't necessarily be what you're paying for. Up to a quarter of fish in New York's restaurants and stores is mislabeled, discovered two high school students at Trinity who took it upon themselves to collect 60 fish samples and send them off for genetic testing. The results showed that when the fish had been misidentified, it was always as a more expensive species, like Acadian redfish being passed off as red snapper.

It wasn't clear whether the suppliers or the stores/restaurants themselves were the ones misleading the public, but anyway, thanks the girls' unique hobby—is this what passes for a standout extracurricular activity on college applications these days?—we can now feel queasily dubious about what our sushi order actually contains.

Study by NYC teens finds fishy labeling of seafood [AP]
Teenage DNA sleuths expose New York fish fraud [Reuters]
Fish photo via Yaokui [Flickr]