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Like most other things found on this list, lungs provide similar value as most others, when you have only one option, find an organ or die, why not take the risk? With little to lose when it comes to quality of life, the lucrative industry has found yet another means to provide incredibly costly services to people with little to no other options. At $312,000 the lung comes at a swift and costly price. Remember the phrase, “It will cost you an arm and a leg?”, perhaps more literally, this organ will cost you a lung or a kidney!
The fish you mean is the ‘totoaba’ – Cynoscion macdonaldi, the Mexican giant croaker.
The Chinese are hardly the only culprits in the decimation of the totoaba. While the Chinese prize their recipe for Seen Kow (a rare, regal, expensive soup-stock), which is made from the totoaba’s ‘buche’ (air bladder), through the 1960s, southern Californians ran through huge quantities ‘Totuava Filet’ packets that were sold openly in the supermarkets, oblivious to the industrial-scale slaughter of the giant fish 150-miles away in the northern Sea of Cortez.