what fish is this?

April 6, 2009 12:29 PM

Can anyone identify what kind of fish this is?

I'm stumped! And its not a mackerel or red snapper, as suggested by some twitterers, either. I'm sorry if this isnt a very worthy askmefi question, but I dont know where else to turn!

posted by minicloud to Grab Bag (9 answers total)

Best answer: umm...i would feel comfortable placing $20 on a North American Red Snapper. Is there a reason why you say it is not?
posted by Black_Umbrella at 12:37 PM on April 6, 2009

Response by poster: well i did a google image search for red snapper and it didnt quite match up...but I suppose its close enough. Thanks!
posted by minicloud at 12:39 PM on April 6, 2009

I admit my laptop screen needs some cleaning, but uh, is that an actual picture or an illustration? Regardless, looks red snapperish.
posted by jerseygirl at 12:40 PM on April 6, 2009

Here is one cooked and one uncooked.
posted by Black_Umbrella at 12:41 PM on April 6, 2009

Red Snapper is just a marketing name for a number of species of rockfish (Sebastidae). And that ain't a rockfish.
posted by fshgrl at 7:18 PM on April 6, 2009

It sure looks like a Silk snapper (Lutjanus vivanus) to me. This fish is most often sold in the US as North American Red snapper, but is more commercially available due to imports from countries with less restrictive quotas such as Venezuela, Honduras and Panama. You can tell from its more pink than red color, and it's pointier pectoral fin. often, over time, the yellow eyes of silks will redden, and lessen the distinction between the two.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 8:52 PM on April 6, 2009

Here's a good reference.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 8:55 PM on April 6, 2009

kuujjuarapik, the mouth is different, the operculum does not extend back as far as the pectoral fin and the caudal peduncle looks quite different to me too (though hard to judge from a photo). Not the same fish. And besides, red snapper is a marketing term not a kind of fish. It's like saying "White fish" or "roe".

My guess is that is some kind of herbivorous warmer water fish, but I don't know my warmer water fish very well so I can't tell you what it is.
posted by fshgrl at 9:38 AM on April 7, 2009

fshgrl,

I think that we can both agree that it is a terrible picture of a fish that we are both looking at. And you may be right about the operculum, I discounted that part because of the angle of the photo. I based my guess on the slope of the head and the shape of the pectoral. I'm not sure that it is a Silk snapper now, but I'm damn sure that I'd take Black_Umbrella's $20 and it's not an American Red. As there are something like 60+ species of Lutjanus snappers, so I'm not sure now that I could pick it out. This is something that I've had to deal with many times in my 17+ years of being a seafood wholesaler, and the amount of small frauds that are perpetrated in the snapper market are overwhelming. My new guess is that the photo was ganked from some Chinese importers website, and I have no idea what species of snapper it is.

The only thing that I would disagree with you is that Red snapper and Whitefish are primarily marketing terms. There are indeed common fish named Lake whitefish and American Red snappers, and trying to import them under other names is likely to get you into problems with the FDA should they ever notice. So on the primary producer and secondary processor levels, these names are legitimate. When the fish is passed on to a restaurant or market, whatever they are going to call them is anyone's guess.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 11:26 AM on April 7, 2009