South Africans loving fish-lookup text service

This is just brilliant. If you’re worried about whether the fish you’re planning to order has been caught legally and isn’t a member of an overfished species, you simply knock off a text message with the fish name. You get a reply back moments later with a colour coded status – red, orange, green….
Link: South Africans hooked on ‘green fish’ SMS service

FishMS was launched by the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI) in December 2006. Since then, more than 3,000 people have used the service over 11,000 times, SAPA news agency reported in July.

You simply SMS the name of the fish you want to eat to a local South African mobile phone number (079-499-8795) and seconds later receive a colour-coded reply.

So if you text for ‘Kingklip’, which, by the way, is a tasty member of the eel family caught in parts of the Southern hemisphere, the response back reads:

Kingklip. Status: ORANGE. High value bycatch of hake bottom trawl and longline fisheries. Over-exploited. Max catch/year 3,500 tonnes.

You can then presumably glare knowingly at the waiter trying to foist it upon you.

Whack off a text about ‘Tuna’ to the FishMS service and you get this back:

Yellowfin tuna (Green), Bigeye tuna (ORANGE), Longfin tuna (Green), Skipjack tuna (Green), Bluefin tuna (ORANGE) and Atlantic bonito (Green).

That was a test question you see, because you’ve got tons of these Tuna fish swimming around — all of them, it seems, in plentiful supply.

And the colour statuses?

Green means the species is plentiful, orange that is it legal to sell it but that stocks are threatened, and red that the fish is a protected species and off-limits to commercial fishing.

Excellent.

I don’t eat fish. Not yet. I can actually injest it without issue, it’s just the salty seawater that doesn’t work with me at the moment. Irrespective of my fish perspective, I do really like to hear about these sorts of enquiry services. It’s clearly been of use to the 3,000 users who have, roughly, texted the service about 3.6 times each.