FERN’s Friday Feed: Something fishy
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
An iconic seafood restaurant sold imported fish as locally-caught
FERN and Gravy
In May of 2024, the owners of Mary Mahoney’s, an institution in Biloxi, Mississippi, pleaded guilty to fraudulently selling more than 29 tons of fish between December 2013 and November 2019, claiming it was locally caught when in fact it was imported. As reporter Boyce Upholt explains, the investigation found that at least 55,000 customers had purchased mislabeled fish. And that was just the beginning. Mahoney’s supplier, Quality Poultry and Seafood—another iconic Biloxi business—had sold mislabeled fish to other restaurants, too. Some of them knew about the scam, some did not. Eventually, both businesses had to forfeit more than a million dollars apiece.
Why are we obsessed with avocados?
Literary Hub
“How did a regional staple from Latin America come to occupy such a central spot in American culture? Why has the avocado become a meme—outshining popular fruits like grapes and bananas—representing individuality and healthy living? And why is it also used as a symbol for all that’s gone wrong? These questions,” write Sarah Allaback and Monique F. Parsons, “led us to wonder about the people behind the product, those who propelled the avocado into our diets and our consciousnesses and who made it an international icon.”
A watershed in motion
bioGraphic (video)
“Watersheds change at a pace that often evades human perception. Millennia might as well be minutes and centuries seconds on the geologic timescales over which watersheds carve valleys, smooth mountains, and shape ecosystems. However, just because they have the power to reshape the world doesn’t mean watersheds are immune to human influence. ‘The Platte River Basin is this 90,000-square-mile watershed that sits right in the heart of the North American continent,’ says Michael Forsberg, a conservation photographer. In 2011, Forsberg started Platte Basin Timelapse, an ambitious project to document how the watershed has changed and is changing using dozens of strategically placed solar-powered cameras, from the headwaters in northern Colorado to where the watershed empties into the Missouri River in eastern Nebraska. Now, researchers are using the more than 5 million photos that have been captured to answer questions about what’s happening in the watershed and what can be done to reduce and, in some cases, reverse human impacts.”
The wild tale of a fishing club, a national park, and a battle over alien trout
Longreads
“What I do know—now—is that the trout in the lake were dumped from an airplane by Colorado Parks & Wildlife. That the first salmon I ever caught, on a river along Lake Michigan, was a species that didn’t exist in the Great Lakes until 1966. That the rainbows I pulled out of Green Lake in Seattle, the fishing that kept me sane during the pandemic, reached their impressive size after years of being fattened in a hatchery. My treasured memories, I’ve learned, are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex—one that has taken a toll on all sorts of insects, invertebrates, frogs, and salamanders,” writes Alex Brown. “It was a Twitter post that first alerted me that this system included a national park: North Cascades, about three hours from my home outside Seattle, is one of the most remote, rugged landscapes in the Lower 48, and the only park to stock non-native fish. I became obsessed with how this came to be. I pored over decades’ worth of newspaper clippings and congressional testimony. I called up state wildlife managers, federal scientists, fishing club members, and environmentalists. Then, after over a year of research, I found myself on a mountainside deep in the park—with 130 baby trout on my back.”
The bittersweet beginnings of the vanilla trade
Smithsonian Magazine
“The flight from Paris to the island of Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, takes 11 hours. … But after disembarking at Roland Garros Airport … you find yourself in a tropical paradise with all the trappings of its motherland, with French wine and cheeses in its supermarkets and a boulangerie around every corner. Four hundred miles east of Madagascar, Réunion is a sort of Francophone Hawaii,” writes Jay Cheshes. “But beyond the plunging waterfalls and palm-tree-lined lagoons hides another story, about this far-flung former colonial outpost’s agricultural history and the beginnings, of all things, of the modern trade in vanilla—and the enslaved youth who made it a commercial success.”