If you’re a lover of seafood, there’s a disturbingly high chance you’ve accidentally eaten critically endangered shark meat, or arranged a Christmas platter with “Aussie caught” prawns and fish that actually originated from an Asian trawler.

A 2023 DNA analysis found more than 1 in 10 seafood products were mislabelled. The study revealed endangered hammerhead shark flesh was being battered and sold as fish-and-chip shop flake. Fillets of spotback skate, a native ray species at risk of extinction, were up for grabs on supermarket shelves.

This so-called “fish fraud” is part of the reason a team of nuclear scientists have worked for almost a decade on a handheld detector that looks like a radar gun and can detect the origin of a food product in minutes.

Dr Debashish Mazumder at ANSTO an

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