Illegal eel: who is pilfering Europe's catch?

In part two of the eel saga, I take a more detailed look at how the pieces of the trade fit together, and what's being done to combat it.

This is my second blog about the illegal trade of eel between Europe and Asia. In the first I wrote about the ecological plight of the eel and the scale of the trade. You can read that post here.

In January 2016, David Baker, an ecologist at The University of Hong Kong's Swire Institute of Marine Science received an unusual package: a frozen, lumpy mass of unknown fish seized at Hong Kong airport. His job was to carry out DNA analysis on the samples to find out what they were. But in solving the mystery, he also uncovered a crime: the fish were European Eel, a species that should never have reached Hong Kong, because trading these animals between Europe and Asia is completely illegal.