news boxnewsbox
Put down the alcoholic beverage while you can; your liver might be able to land you more than half a million dollars! Just kidding, well actually, technically it could. The liver is another highly demanded organ on a wait list, at 6,000 liver transplants a year, and over 11,000 people left hanging every year waiting for an organ. In most cases, these online organs go to the highest bidder, that’s right, these organs are being bid on and there’s no cap for how high they can be sold for. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, the criminals operating these underground markets will go through an avenue necessary to sell these organs for the highest price.
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.