Reproductive justice–driven pregnancy interventions can improve mental health

Principles aim to increase autonomy, community input, racial equity, and/or cultural relevance

Wolters Kluwer Health

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March 10, 2025 — Perinatal interventions guided by reproductive justice principles can have positive effects on the perinatal mental health of Black birthing patients and, perhaps, the mental health development of their infants, states a systematic review published in a special issue of Harvard Review of Psychiatry, part of the Lippincott portfolio from Wolters Kluwer.

Mental health interventions incorporating reproductive justice principles "utilize a trauma-informed approach to address the psychosocial stress and trauma of racism and their negative effects on pregnant parents and offspring," Cristiane S. Duarte, PhD, MPH, of Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) and New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City, and colleagues explain. "They link the health of pregnant parents to the upstream structural determinant of racism and attempt to combat its negative effects on both physical and mental health by giving agency back to Black birthing communities."

High-level evidence-quantified intervention outcomes in multiple settings

Dr. Duarte’s team identified 12 randomized controlled trials of interventions explicitly designed to address reproductive justice or increase autonomy, community input, racial equity, and/or the cultural relevance of perinatal care for Black birthing people and their infants. The interventions were initiated during pregnancy or delivery and occurred in hospitals, prenatal clinics, and birthing centers, as well as during home visits. The trials measured maternal and/or infant mental health outcomes or developmental processes relevant to mental health.

Five studies employed interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) or culturally tailored cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), two focused on group prenatal care, and four investigated culturally tailored home visiting programs with local community health workers or doulas. Ten studies measured maternal mental health, one included both infant mental development and maternal mental health outcomes, and one focused on infant mental development.

Positive mental health effects observed in a variety of outcomes

Seven studies had statistically significant positive results. Six found improvement in maternal mental health outcomes: reduction in ante/postpartum depressive symptoms (five studies), antepartum anxiety, and antepartum stress, and increase in postpartum adjustment. The other study identified a significant effect on infant mental health with REACH-Futures (Resources, Education, and Care in the Home by Black community health workers). One of the studies without significant findings was a pilot trial that did not evaluate for statistical significance.

"Effective intervention types included psychologically oriented modalities (IPT, culturally tailored/culturally sensitive CBT, CBT integrated into home visits), group prenatal care integrated with skill-building sessions (CenteringPregnancy Plus), and an educational intervention based on an interactive online platform (Birthly)," reports Simone Dreux, a CUIMC medical student and one of the article’s lead authors. "Of note, most effective interventions were specifically geared toward birthing people deemed at risk for developing mental health conditions—including antepartum and postpartum depression, and antepartum anxiety—as well as those with a previous history of mental health conditions."

Eight studies recruited predominantly low-income participants. Four of them found significant benefits for maternal mental health, and one study (REACH-Futures) found a significant benefit for infant mental development. "This finding is notable because low-income Black birthing people are at even higher risk of developing perinatal mental health conditions than low-income people of other races," the authors point out.

In their discussion, Dr. Duarte’s team suggests potential mechanisms related to their results: Engaging racially concordant community health workers “may increase social belonging, reduce isolation, and improve the emotional experience of pregnancy.” Culturally relevant, psychologically oriented interventions may improve mental health by focusing on “communication skills, goal setting, and problem-solving.” Additionally, group care affirms and respects the autonomy of birthing patients by allowing them to “take ownership of their prenatal care.”

Read Article: Reproductive Justice Interventions in Pregnancy: Moving Toward Improving Black Maternal Perinatal and Intergenerational Mental Health Outcomes

Wolters Kluwer provides trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers, and students in effective decision-making and outcomes across health care. We support clinical effectiveness, learning and research, clinical surveillance and compliance, as well as data solutions. For more information about our solutions, visit https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/health.

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About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer (EURONEXT: WKL) is a global leader in information, software solutions and services for professionals in healthcare; tax and accounting; financial and corporate compliance; legal and regulatory; corporate performance and ESG. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with technology and services.

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Journal

Harvard Review of Psychiatry

Article Title

Reproductive Justice Interventions in Pregnancy: Moving Toward Improving Black Maternal Perinatal and Intergenerational Mental Health Outcomes

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

 

What’s in a label? It’s different for boys vs. girls, new study of parents finds

Psychology research shows parents use gender-neutral terms for boys and men more often than for girls and women

New York University

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A decades-old riddle poses the following scenario: A boy is injured in a car crash in which the father dies and is taken to the emergency room, where the doctor says, “I cannot operate on him—he’s my son.” Who, then, is the doctor? Many over the years have been stumped in not recognizing the answer: the mother. 

Similarly, research has shown that adults instinctively think of men when asked to think of a person—they describe the most “typical” person they can imagine as male and assume storybook characters without a specified gender are men. A new study by psychology researchers shows that the way parents talk to their children may contribute to these perceptions.

Their findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that parents across the US are more likely to use gender-neutral labels—for instance, “kid”—more often for boys than for girls and to use gender-specific labels, such as “girl,” more often for girls than for boys. 

“While perceptions of gender are driven by a variety of factors, our research identifies one of the social influences that may contribute to our tendency to equate men with people in general and points to potential ways to address this bias,” says Rachel Leshin, the paper’s lead author, a New York University doctoral student at the time of the study and now a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. 

The tendency to view men as default “people” is also reflected in our collective reality: Internet searches for “people” yield more images of men than women, and men remain overrepresented in a host of fields, including politics, media, and medicine. 

“This bias has important consequences for issues of gender equity, as perceiving men as the ‘default’ has the potential to elevate their concerns, priorities, and values above those of others,” explains Leshin. “Understanding the specific factors that may lay the foundation for these male defaults is one way to start thinking about how to intervene on this bias.”

To explore this matter, Leshin and her colleagues conducted experiments involving more than 800 parent-children pairs, with mothers making up more than 90 percent of the parental participants. In one, which included more than 600 parents of children aged 4 to 10 from across the US, parents were shown photographs of individual children playing on a playground—both boys and girls—and asked to come up with a caption that they then read aloud to their children. 

In this experiment, parents were more likely to use gender-neutral labels (e.g., “The kid is sliding”) when describing boys relative to girls. Conversely, parents were more likely to use gender-specific labels (e.g., “This girl is swinging”) when describing girls relative to boys.

The researchers were also interested in knowing whether the results of the first study would extend to both stereotypical and counter-stereotypical depictions of children, so they conducted a second study. 

In this one, which included nearly 200 parent-child pairs, primarily from the US, parents participated in a virtual picture-book-reading task designed to elicit open-ended discussion of gender-related themes. The picture book consisted of pages depicting a character engaged in a distinct gendered behavior—for example, digging for worms (stereotypical of boys) or painting fingernails (stereotypical of girls). Across the various pages, boys and girls were depicted as engaging in stereotypical gendered behaviors (e.g., a boy digging for worms) and counter-stereotypical behaviors (e.g., a girl digging for worms). 

Consistent with the first experiment, the parents used more gender-neutral labels when discussing boys engaged in stereotypical behavior (e.g., a boy digging for worms) than they did for girls engaged in stereotypical behavior (e.g., a girl painting her nails). However, when discussing images depicting counter-stereotypical behavior, these patterns reversed: Parents used more gender-neutral labels when discussing counter-stereotypical girls compared to counter-stereotypical boys—for example, calling a girl digging for worms a “kid” more often than they called a boy painting his nails a “kid.” 

“These findings reveal a notable bias in how parents see gender, signaling that a ‘person,’ by default, is a male,” observes Leshin.

The paper’s other authors were Josie Benitez, an NYU doctoral student, Serena Fu, an NYU undergraduate at the time of the study, Sophia Cordeiro, a lab manager at NYU, and Marjorie Rhodes, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology. 

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-2017375) and the National Institutes of Health (1F31HD107965, R01HD087672).

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

" 'Kids and Girls': Parents convey a male default in child-directed speech"

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

 

Proximity and prejudice: Gay discrimination in the gig economy

University of Queensland research has found discrimination based on sexual orientation is common in the gig economy, but only for tasks requiring close physical proximity.

University of Queensland

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University of Queensland research has found discrimination based on sexual orientation is common in the gig economy, but only for tasks requiring close physical proximity.

Dr David Smerdon, Dr Samuel Pearson and Dr Sabina Albrecht ran an experiment on a popular online marketplace involving more than 1,100 job posts across 6 Australian cities.

“To test whether workers discriminate against gay men, we created hundreds of fictitious male ‘requester’ profiles, with some clearly signalling they were gay by referring to their male partner or with a couple profile photo,” Dr Pearson said.

“The requested tasks were either inside the home – such as moving furniture – requiring close physical proximity between requester and worker, or outside – such as gardening – allowing for greater physical distance between requester and worker.

“We tracked engagement with profiles and discovered that workers were less likely to interact with gay requesters for tasks requiring close physical proximity.

“Furthermore, the workers who did reply to gay requester profiles were more likely to have lower ratings, as measured by other platform users.”

Dr Smerdon said the findings provide an important glimpse into what had been a hidden form of discrimination.

”Aside from the impact on individuals, more broadly this sort of bias distorts the labour market through inefficient allocation of talent, occupational segregation and lower productivity,” Dr Smerdon said.

“The gig economy is a relatively new digital frontier with lower regulatory oversight when it comes to anti-discrimination and its reliance on peer ratings and evaluations.

“But more and more of us are engaging in the gig economy either through income or services, so it’s crucial we understand how and when discrimination exists.”

The researchers said it was unlikely that regulatory changes would address this bias.

“The answer would seem to lie with the online platforms themselves, who until now may have been unaware of this happening,” Dr Smerdon said.

“Infrastructure changes, similar to those successfully introduced by several platforms to address racial discrimination, could perhaps also be applied here.” 

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2412362122 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Physical proximity drives gay discrimination in the gig economy

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

 

Common approaches for assessing business impact on biodiversity are powerful, but often insufficient for strategy design

University of Oxford

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A University of Oxford study has determined that the widely used tools available to businesses for assessing their biodiversity impacts depend on broad assumptions and can have large uncertainties that are poorly understood or communicated. If used appropriately, they can be powerful tools to help guide effective action to address biodiversity loss – but if not, they can lead to misguided effort and can be insufficient for robust biodiversity strategy design.

Businesses across a range of industries and sectors are under growing pressure to develop biodiversity strategies that not only minimise their negative impacts but also enhance their positive contributions to nature. As businesses start on their nature positive journey, a range of tools and approaches have emerged to help them assess risks and impacts on biodiversity. Among the leading approaches increasingly recommended for assessing organisational impacts on nature are Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). These approaches offer a powerful means to track environmental impacts across all business activities and stages of product’s life cycles, capturing many of the pressures driving the loss of biodiversity from land-use change to eutrophication. The results provide businesses with data on their environmental impacts which can inform decision-making and measure progress year-on-year.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Nature Positive Hub and The Biodiversity Consultancy has investigated the assumptions made by these tools, and outlined the opportunities and risks associated with their use in biodiversity strategy design.

LCAs are one of the only methods accessible for assessing broad life cycle impacts by gathering data on company activities and estimating the environmental pressures exerted by all the inputs and outputs to a company’s activities. The methods are therefore now being used to estimate “biodiversity footprints”, a term used to refer to estimates of organisational biodiversity impacts. However, LCA-based methods and associated models were not originally developed for biodiversity footprinting and have recognised limitations in capturing the complexities of biodiversity.

In addition, despite their ease of use, LCAs carry significant uncertainties. These arise from the structure of the models—such as which biodiversity threats are included—the quality and completeness of the underlying data, and the way results are presented. As a result, these uncertainties can influence user decision making, potentially resulting in misleading conclusions.

Dr Thomas White (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), co-lead of the study, says: “Whilst recognised by those very familiar with LCAs, these uncertainties are often overlooked or poorly communicated to users. LCAs can be very powerful tools for understanding impacts on biodiversity, but without careful navigation, these uncertainties can lead to misinformed decisions, misallocated resources, and ineffective biodiversity strategies. In the paper we suggest ways that researchers and practitioners can help reveal, reduce, and appropriately navigate these uncertainties to improve LCA use.”

While LCAs are powerful tools for assessing biodiversity impacts across life cycle stages and biodiversity pressures, they must be used in conjunction with conservation science best practices and direct biodiversity monitoring to develop effective and actionable biodiversity strategies.

Dr Talitha Bromwich (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), the other co-lead of the study, says: “The tools can be very useful so long as an understanding of the risks posed by these uncertainties exists. Businesses should be able to weigh them against the costs of inappropriate action or inaction, and ensure decisions are robust to these uncertainties. If this is done well, then we can still design effective biodiversity strategies that utilise these tools to their greatest potential.”

The researchers have suggested several recommendations to embed these tools within business strategy design. These include:

• Risk screening & tracking progress: LCAs are most effective for high-level risk screening, prioritising action, and tracking biodiversity impact reduction over time.
• Complemented by other approaches: Once high-impact areas are identified, LCAs should be paired with more specific approaches to provide robust impact estimates and guide effective, location-specific recommendations from conservation science.
• Cautious use & complementary metrics: LCA impact values should be interpreted carefully due to uncertainties and lack of specificity. Targets should combine LCA and non-LCA metrics, focusing on direct biodiversity measurements, pressure reductions, and clear conservation actions. Care should be taken when using absolute estimates of biodiversity impact from LCA’s in strategy design.

Notes to editors

Interviews with Thomas White & Talitha Bromwich are available on request: thomas.white@biology.ox.ac.uk; talitha.bromwich@biology.ox.ac.uk.

The paper ‘Navigating uncertainty in LCA-based approaches to biodiversity footprinting’ will be published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution at 05:01 AM GMT / 01:01 AM ET on Monday 10 March at: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/2041-210X.70001

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the ninth year running, and ​number 3 in the QS World Rankings 2024. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 300 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past five years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing £15.7 billion to the UK economy in 2018/19, and supports more than 28,000 full time jobs.

The Department of Biology is a University of Oxford department within the Maths, Physical, and Life Sciences Division. It utilises academic strength in a broad range of bioscience disciplines to tackle global challenges such as food security, biodiversity loss, climate change and global pandemics. It also helps to train and equip the biologists of the future through holistic undergraduate and graduate courses. For more information visit www.biology.ox.ac.uk.

About The Biodiversity Consultancy

The Biodiversity Consultancy exists to bridge the worlds of business and biodiversity. Our work aims to accelerate organisations’ journeys towards nature positive futures. The Biodiversity Consultancy was born of a very clear premise: in the future, all businesses will need to think, operate and act with respect to nature and biodiversity.

Since our founding, science and innovation have been at the core of our approach, ensuring that the businesses we work with, and the standards we help set, are taking robust action that benefits nature.  Being leaders in the underlying science of biodiversity, we continue to actively engage in scientific research - collaborating with research organisations to develop practical and robust solutions that improve business engagement with nature.

Our initiatives help businesses align with performance and international lender standards, manage risks and take effective action to mitigate their impacts. The Biodiversity Consultancy have played leading roles in developing best practice standards and frameworks. We are also an active member of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) Forum and the Science-Based Targets Network Corporate Engagement Program, and partner with industry associations such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, IUCN, and UNEP-FI.

For more information visit www.thebiodiversityconsultancy.com.

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Journal

Methods in Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1111/2041-210x.70001 

Article Title

Navigating uncertainty in LCA-based approaches to biodiversity footprinting

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

 

Facebook is constantly experimenting on consumers — and even its creators don’t fully know how it works

University of British Columbia - Sauder School of Business

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Users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok might think they’re simply interacting with friends, family and followers, and seeing ads as they go. But according to research from the UBC Sauder School of Business, they’re part of constant marketing experiments that are often impossible, even for the companies behind them, to fully comprehend.

For the study, the researchers examined all known published, peer-reviewed studies of the use of A/B testing by Facebook and Google — that is, when different consumers are shown different ads to determine which are most effective — and uncovered significant flaws.

UBC Sauder Associate Professors and study co-authors Dr. Yann Cornil and Dr. David Hardisty say that at any given moment, billions of social media users are being tested to see what they click on, and most importantly for marketers, what they buy. From that, one would think advertisers could tell which messages are effective and which aren’t — but it turns out it isn’t nearly that simple.

By using Facebook’s A/B test tool, researchers can access a massive audience and observe real behaviour — and because the participants are unaware they’re part of an experiment, their responses are considered more genuine and reliable.

The problem is that highly complex algorithms decide which consumers will be shown different content and ads; and as a result it’s impossible for anyone — even those who created the algorithms — to fully understand why specific consumers have been targeted by an ad, and to determine why some of them decided to click on the ad. According to Dr. Cornil, it comes down to a lack of something called “random assignment” — for example, when experimenters randomly present two different ads to selected groups.

“You can’t say that whatever changes you made in your ad are causing an increase in click behaviour, because within each ad there's going to be an algorithm that will select the participants most likely to click on it. If the algorithms are different, it means that there's no real random assignment,” he says. “It also means we cannot say for sure that an ad generated a higher click-through rate because creatively it's a better ad. It might be because it's associated with a better algorithm.”

What’s more, people are often shown ads based on their search history, but if they have already decided on a particular product, and then the algorithm shows them an ad for it, researchers might wrongly conclude the ad led them to buy it.

“It will choose people not just on observable things like age or gender or location that we can easily know, but on unobservable things like past behaviour, interests, and even things that Facebook itself cannot quantify, because they’re determined by machine learning and AI,” says Dr. Hardisty. The targeted groups might seem similar in some ways, he adds, but the algorithm may have chosen them for completely different reasons.

“It's basically a complicated model that has somehow figured out that some type of person — we don't know what type — is more likely to click. So even if we asked people at Facebook, ‘Why was this group of people selected?’ they wouldn’t know the answer.”

So why does this matter? For one, many marketers rely on Facebook A/B testing to determine what to advertise and how; but perhaps even more importantly, different segments of the public can be excluded from important information, which can reinforce divides.

“There's one paper that explains why women are not targeted by ads for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education purely because of algorithms,” says Dr. Cornil. “Women are more expensive to target on social media, and those algorithms are going to try to generate as many clicks as possible at the lowest cost. So if women are too costly to target for the purpose of STEM education, they are not targets.”

What’s more, the algorithms then reinforce what’s working and what isn’t, so if women aren’t clicking on particular ads, they will be even less exposed to them.

While the UBC study — titled On the Persistent Mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B Tests: How to Conduct and Report Online Platform Studies — focuses on Facebook and Google, the researchers say that all of the major social media platforms, from Instagram to TikTok, employ similar practices.

They are also ubiquitous. At a conference a Facebook employee once told Dr. Hardisty that at any given time, every Facebook user is an unwitting participant in an average of 10 different experiments. With the advent of AI-generated content and ads, that number is almost certainly on the rise.

As a result, Dr. Hardisty and Dr. Cornil — who co-authored the study with Dr. Johannes Boegershausen of Erasmus University and Dr. Shangwen Yi of Hong Kong Polytechnic University — warn that marketers should beware of reading too much into the results of Facebook A/B testing.

“If you have an ad that’s going crazy and getting a lot more clicks, it may just be that Facebook successfully identified a small, particular group of people that really like it,” says Dr. Hardisty. “And if you change your whole product line or campaign to match that, it might actually be alienating to most people. So you have to be very careful not to draw broader lessons from one Facebook study.”

In fact, the algorithms are so complex and precise, adds Dr. Cornil, social media platforms can “micro-target” people right down to the individual level. “It's selecting the best possible ads for a specific segment — and the segment isn’t even a group of people. With all the data we have about consumers, the segment is one,” he says. “And it all happens in a black box. The advertiser doesn't know, but the machine knows. AI knows.”

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Journal

International Journal of Research in Marketing

DOI

10.1016/j.ijresmar.2024.12.004 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

On the persistent mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B tests: How to conduct and report online platform studies

 

Growing consumption of the American eel may lead to it being critically endangered like its European counterpart

A study by a Yale-NUS research team finds the endangered American eel being sold in Singapore as ‘eel’or ‘unagi’ – findings call for more attention to monitor the eel trade

Yale-NUS College

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High demand for eel combined with decline in stock have resulted in soaring prices for this food item, which in many cultures, is considered a delicacy. This has fuelled a concern globally as the prized food item is now being illegally traded from Europe to Asia.

Current research has focused on the critically endangered Anguilla anguilla, commonly known as the European eel. While its export outside the European Union is tightly regulated, large quantities of A. anguilla juveniles continue to be smuggled out of the EU to Asia where they are grown in eel farms until reaching a marketable size.

To investigate the prevalence and consumption of endangered eels – particularly the European eel – a Yale-NUS College research team examined 327 individual eel products purchased across 86 retailers throughout Singapore. However, instead of prevalence of the European eel, the team identified 70% of another species in the sample – Anguilla rostrata, commonly known as the American eel. While not critically endangered like the European eel, the American eel is also considered an endangered species. The findings suggested a possible shift in trade and consumption of eel to the American eel.

Given these findings, the research team called for specific attention to the American eel, with increased enforcement and monitoring needed as proactive steps necessary to avoid the same dramatic population declines that have been documented in other eel species like the European eel.

The paper was a result of Yale-NUS alumnus Joshua Choo (Class of 2024)’s Environment Studies capstone, which he did under the supervision of Yale-NUS Assistant Professor of Science (Marine Biology) Benjamin Wainwright. The paper was published in Conservation Science and Practice. In July 2024, Joshua presented the research at the 2024 International Eel Science Symposium in Liverpool, UK.

Joshua said, “It was sad to connect Singaporean unagi with the history of anguillid eel exploitation – where a crash in one anguillid’s stock repeatedly leads to another’s overexploitation and crash. It was, however, heartening to see so many researchers and Indigenous groups invested in anguillid recovery in Liverpool – from Japan to Aotearoa to the EU and UK. There’s room for Southeast Asian perspectives in eel science – it’s important to protect tropical anguillids from the endangerment plaguing their temperate cousins, and to explore conservation solutions for our food that can bypass profit-driven overexploitation.”

Joshua and the research team performed DNA barcoding of the samples of eel meat, sold as ‘eel’ or ‘unagi’ by supermarkets, restaurants, and wholesalers. Their findings found three pieces of the critically endangered European eel (which is banned from export outside the EU), and that 217 of the 257 products he tested were the endangered, though not internationally regulated, American eel.

“The mislabelling of seafood products is a significant global problem that contributes to ongoing biodiversity losses in the oceans. This deliberate mislabelling can have negative consequences for the health of human consumers and presents numerous opportunities for organised crime to prosper. The trade in eels is described as the greatest wildlife crime on Earth, it supports vast criminal networks that illegally traffic many hundreds of millions of glass eels (juvenile eels) to Asia each year,” said Asst Prof Wainwright.

He further explained, “What we show with this work is a likely shift in trade, this shift could be the consequence of EU enforced rules and regulations making it harder to smuggle the European eel to Asia, consequently suppliers have now shifted their focus to the less regulated American eel. If the American eel is to avoid a similar fate to that suffered by the European eels, it will be important to closely monitor the American eel trade and introduce rules and regulations designed to prevent overexploitation.” 

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Journal

Conservation Science and Practice

DOI

10.1111/csp2.70013 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animal tissue samples

Article Title

A shift in the trade? An investigation of the eel trade reveals a likely species switch