Fish maw — the dried swim bladder of ray-finned fishes — is prized across East and Southeast Asia as a culinary delicacy and symbol of wealth and status. In Chinese culture, it’s served at family and business gatherings. Beyond tradition, maw is promoted for supposed health and beauty benefits, from aiding recovery after childbirth to reducing signs of aging due to its high collagen content. As demand has surged with urbanization and rising incomes, fish maw trade has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry. In Hong Kong alone, studies have found maw imports were worth up to $394 million between 2015 and 2018, with some single bladders selling for nearly half a million dollars. Rare species fetch the highest prices, but once processed, maw is hard to identify — this opens the door to mislabeling and substitutions that mislead buyers. “Given the value of the trade, it is surprising that we do not really know what species are involved or where they are coming from,” Benjamin Wainwright, a marine biologist at the National University of Singapore, told Mongabay by email. A new study, published in Conservation Letters in June 2025, sheds light on the fish maw trade in Singapore and Malaysia. Led by Wainwright and marine taxonomist Seah Ying Giat of Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, the study used DNA barcoding to identify the species behind the trade — revealing, among others, the presence of two vulnerable, four endangered and two critically endangered species on the IUCN Red List, including the European eel…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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