A pair of NYC high school students used about $300 to buy supplies for their study of restaurant fish. They spent it mostly at sushi bars. They discovered that customers often aren’t getting what they pay for:

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

They’ve been praised for their amateur inquiry.