Dr. Latto mentioned some of Palumbi's work in lecture today on using DNA to identify whale species sold in markets. He has also done some work on "Red Snapper" which usually turns out to be a number of other species including some threatened rockfish species.

Here is a little video showing a bit about how the research works. And here is a website with a few other interesting videos from his work

Did you know that when you buy "Pacific Red Snapper" it often isn't Red Snapper at all? Pacific Red Snapper actually isn't a species at all, it describes a number of different species, usually of Rockfish which are sold under that name. Steve shows Lynne Rosetto Kaspar (of NPR's "The Splendid Table") how to extract and sequence DNA from supermarket fillets to tell what kind of fish they really are.