The Menu Says “Snapper.” Really?

Take it from a former cashier: Barcodes revolutionized the grocery store. No longer would an overworked and underpaid employee struggle to recall the difference between a fennel bulb and a celery root, or fall for a price tag swap between canned salmon and canned tuna.

But barcodes were there long before cashiers could scan them. Deep within the flesh of every living being, a short sequence of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs—representing the four chemicals that make up DNA—reveals a species’ unique identity. Paul Bentzen, an ichthyologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, reads nature’s barcodes to learn about what’s on his plate. He and his colleagues have been stocking a database with DNA barcodes so that within a couple (BOLD), based at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Currently, the database includes more than 138,000 entries.