The Walton's Say No to Monkfish

I am orginally from Arkansas so I am all too acquainted with the evil that is Wal-Mart. In Conway, AR, my favorite hardware store and a lot of the local downtown shops are gone now thanks to the new supercenter. Apparenlty, ADSA has fallen far(?) from the tree. ASDA is a supermarket chain found throughout the U.K. and is part of the Wal-Mart "family". The BBC reports today that ASDA is to stop selling Monkfish.

The retail giant says it will no longer supply the restaurant favourite until there are more sustainable ways of catching it. Asda said the technique used to harvest the deep-sea monkfish was damaging to the marine ecosystem. It urged celebrity chefs to stop serving or endorsing the fish.

Monkfish is the common term used for any manner of fish typically of the genus Lophius in the anglerfishes. The moniker is also used for angel shark but those typically don't wind up on your dinner plate. Most common of the strip-mined harvested species is Lophius piscatorius Its a bottom fish with a depth range of 20 - 1000m. Suprisingly it does not appear to be on the IUCN red list. Oddly it was considered worthless but increasing prices for monkfish livers in Asian markets provided a market. The species is dredged or trawled both which have been repetitively shown to destroy marine habitats.