Critically endangered eels, worth billions of Euros are being trafficked each year from Europe and end on tables in Japan and China as a culinary delight. Wildlife activists have called this “the largest wildlife crime on Earth.”

As mankind has encroached more and more land, disrupting water bodies and constructed more dams, stocks of European eel (anguilla anguilla) have plummeted 90 per cent in three decades. On top of that, criminal gangs smuggling the lucrative fish are pushing it towards oblivion.

Despite growing alarm from conservationists, hundreds of tonnes of eels are still legally and illegally fished each year. In France — which catches more of the fish than any other EU state — the issue has taken on political dimensions.