![]() ![]() They return on the Shikishima-maru around noon, sunburnt and tipsy, carrying white buckets filled with pufferfish. Each prefecture has its own tests for issuing licenses to chefs and others, and an industry group has pushed the government to standardize those tests.īefore dawn on a recent weekday, dozens of hobby fishermen throng a deserted dock in the Ohara port, a two-hour drive from Tokyo, to get a chance to catch the creature. The resulting hybrid, which has fine spots and yellow-white fins, could pass for either one of its parent species.Ī division of Japan’s health ministry in charge of food safety said it began collecting information about the reported increase in hybrid pufferfish in September. ![]() There, they bred with their sibling species and multiplied. stictonotus escaped their gradually warming habitat by riding the Tsushima current north and crossing the strait just below Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido to emerge in the Pacific Ocean. ![]() stictonotus usually swim around the Sea of Japan and the T. Genetic tests found that the unidentifiable pufferfish were a hybrid of Takifugu stictonotus and Takifugu snyderi. At the end of June, more than 20 percent of pufferfish caught in a single day off the Pacific coast of Miyagi prefecture, 460 kilometers northeast of Tokyo, were hybrids. Even veterans in the industry say it’s nearly impossible to tell apart “quarters,” or second-generation offspring of hybrid fish. To an untrained eye, hybrids are barely discernible. “It wasn’t one out of a thousand as it had been in the past this was on a completely different scale,” he says. Hiroshi Takahashi, an associate professor at the National Fisheries University, poses for a photograph at his laboratory in Shimonoseki, southern Japan November 12, 2018. Fugu fish death skin#Confusingly, the location of the deadly neurotoxin differs in certain types of pufferfish it can sometimes be found in its skin or muscle, as well as its reproductive organs. Chefs and fish butchers handling pufferfish are specially trained and licensed to remove its liver and reproductive organs, which contain tetrodotoxin, a potent neurotoxin. Out of 50 or so species of pufferfish found around Japan, 22 of them are approved as edible by the government. “But we have to follow the rules, because if there’s any problems it leads to hysteria,” says Naoto Itou, the gruff patriarch of the company. ![]() Kaniya, a seafood-processing company here in Shimonoseki, is one of many in the industry frustrated by the government’s rule to discard such hybrids, considering that most subspecies of pufferfish frequently found in Japan’s northeastern waters have poison in the same organs and can be safely eaten if handled correctly. With the rise of these unclassifiable hybrids, fishermen and fish traders are having to discard a sizable share of their catch. To avoid accidental poisonings, Japan prohibits their sale and distribution. The problem is that they can be hard to distinguish from established species. Hybrids are no more dangerous than your average lethal pufferfish. With pufferfish heading north to seek cooler waters, sibling species of the fish have begun to inter-breed, triggering a sudden increase in the number of hybrid fish. When a supermarket in western Japan accidentally sold five packets of the fish without its poisonous liver removed in January, the town used its missile alert system to warn residents.Īnd now, climate change is adding a new element of risk: Fishermen are discovering an unprecedented number of hybrid species in their catch as seas surrounding the archipelago – particularly off the northeastern coast – see some of the fastest rates of warming in the world. News of poisonings elicits fevered national coverage. A kilogram fetches as much as 30,000 yen at the market here, and in the December holiday season, when fugu is particularly popular, a luxury fishmonger in Tokyo can sell up to $88,000 worth of the fish on any given day. The furtive bidding, a relic of a time when fish traders wore kimonos whose sleeves obscured their hands as they signaled their bids, is part of the insular world of Japanese pufferfish, or fugu, a fish best known for its ability to kill a person in as little as a few hours.Īlthough deaths are extremely rare, the whiff of danger associated with the fish’s poison is a significant element of the delicacy’s enduring allure in Japanese culture. ![]()
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