Some here know I've been dealing with fish lately. Fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for supper, and more fish. Slippery slimey scaly fish (I try to avoid the smelly ones).

There's two good things about buying your fish whole (the bad things are called "scaling", "gutting" and "boning") - you can make some judgement how fresh it is, and you have a ghost of a chance of identifying what it actually is you bought.

Scientific taxonomy is bad enough. Take "Yellow Croaker". There's two fish sold in Southern California as "Yellow Croaker". There are at least two scienteriffic names for fish called "Yellow Croaker" except Fishbase says they both point to the same fish - but their photos are so bad I'm not sure even which one they're talking about.

Other authorities are specific about two fish but are not specific about which is which, or even if they know. It's common for markets to display the two side by side calling one "Yellowfish" and the other "Yellow Croaker" or some other variation. I prefer the convention of calling one "Yellow Croaker" and the other "Yellow Corvina" (Spanish for croaker) and that ID seems to hold up better than others, at least around here.

It's also wonderful to check the photos on Fishbase (29,300 fish described) and find they have five photos for a particular fish - one of which looks exactly like the fish in my hand and the other four look like something else entierely - and EVERY photo is captioned "Identification to be verified (ongoing)". What the hell are we paying these scientist folk for, anyway?

Yeah, yeah, I know - it's a tough job, and every scientist is clawing at every other scientist's throat over minor details of interpretaion. Yeah, I know they're underpaid, but how much should we pay them for having fun anyway?

So lets go on to commercial taxonomy. Here we leave academic bickering and enter two realms: deliberate deception and wild guessing.

Now to the wild gussing front. Last week I bought a large fish (over 5 pounds) labeled "Sheephead' with a subscript "Bacoco". Now identifying this critter shouldn't be rocket science, because Fishbase lists only a dozen fish called "Sheephead" and just three called "Bacoco".

Alas, it was clearly none of either and every feature screamed "Croaker", but this fish was big. If I didn't know that drums and croakers are the same thing I'd never have found it was a "freshwater drum".

And then there's pomfrets. Yes, there really are pomfrets but silver pomfrets are actualy butterfish and black pomfrets are actually pompanos and no real pomfrets are to be found at all.

So Saturday I saw a bunch of fish labeled "Spanish Mackerel" and bought some. Got them home and looked at them carefully. There's at least a half dozen fish called Spanish mackerel, but you'd expect at least a fish so labled would be a mackerel - and this was clearly a scad.

OK, it was a "mackerel scad" because it's a scad that looks a lot like a mackerel but it's not a mackerel and it's not Spanish, it's related to jacks and pompanos (some of which are called pomfrets even though they aren't).

By the way, in the larger sizes (10 to 12 inches), pan dressed and deep fried in olive oil mackerel scad is veeeery good eating - beats out most mackerel.

So on to actual deception.

How about "Chilean Sea Bass". It's a "made up out of thin air" name for a bland deep water fish properly labeled "Patagonian Toothfish". The name was made up by a California fish distributor desperate to sell a small mountain of toothfish he'd bought. Finally, when the supply of another bland fish was interrupted he made a sale. Now the Japanese will pay over 1,000 US$ cold cash for any toothfish they can get, supporting a fleet of pirate fishing boats and sending the toothfish to the extinction watch list.

Or this years darling of the chef set, the "Black Cod". This ugly limp floppy thing is properly known as "sablefish" (completely unrelated to actual cod) but nobody was able to sell one under that name. Now the menu price has just crossed the orbit of Neptune outbound.

But lets try some real deception. In upscale cookbooks you'll find recipes requiring "Dover Sole" (Fishbase "Common Sole"). This is also called "European sole" but it's really pretty worldwide - except for the Pacific coast of North, Central and South America.

On the West Coast we have a flatfish marketed as "Dover Sole" (Fishbase "Dover Sole") the real name of which is "Slime Fish" and it's primary use is mink food on fur farms. It's secondary use is for sale to unsuspecting gourmets as "Dover Sole" - and heaven help anyone who's using a "slime fish" in a recipe calling for "common sole".

Or how about "China Sole"? It's a made up name for Vietnamese catfish for markets that think they don't like catfish. In markets that do like catfish it's called "catfish" without any suggestion it isn't American channel cat. But there's a double deception here. In Asian markets it's sold as "Basa" but it's actually "Tra". Basa is the preferred catfish in Vietnam, but Americans (even of Vietnamese descent) either don't know the difference or don't care, so the faster growing Tra is shipped out labeled "Basa", but that's an improvement over "China Sole" (which doesn't grow in China anyway).

OK, I could go on for another 6 or 7 yards of text wihout having to pause to think, but Scott says we're "bandwidth limited" now so I'll call it a night.

Next week, "Jumbo Shrimp". What's a shrimp and what's a prawn - nobody knows.

. . a father of taxonomy who couldn't keep his own name straight.

Sablefish is family Anoploponatidae, Lingcod is family Hexagrammidae - not related.

European Dover Sole (Common Sole) is a sole, West Coast Dover Sole is a flounder. Rex Sole and Petrale Sole are also West Coast flounders but they're good eating and Petrale can stand in for European sole just fine.

In Europe flounders are called flounders and sole are called sole but in North America any flounder on the menu is called a sole because that sounds classy and European.

. . but the others definitely are.

There are so many fish and so little knowledge about them variations within a species aren't even being considered yet.

Some fish can appear quite different depending on their age which adds more confusion.

Then there's communication problem with marine biologists (which the Internet is starting to fix to some extent). For instance the Pacific and Atlantic species of Crevalle Jack are probably minor variations of the same species (the Atlantic one grows a bit bigger). There are lots of fish with two, three, four or even more "official scientific names".

Biologists can't agree even on fairly major issues. For instance some divide Pacific Rockfish into two orders and some say they're all scorpionfish and don't recognize the naming conventions of the other camp.

Reclassification and renaming is continuous as well. Even so well known a species as the Rainbow Trout (known as Steelhead in it's seagoing form) was recently reclassified from being an Atlantic salmon to being a Pacific trout.

And, of course, the persistent problem of local names being used for different fish in different areas and the same fish being called different names in different areas. For it's 29,300 species of fish Fishbase lists 217,200 Common names.

Pile on top of this deliberately misleading marketing names and you have something approximating chaos.