Every day more than 250,000 sharks are killed. Remove sharks from the ocean ecosystem and we see a domino effect, catastrophic waves through the web of life. Ecologists call this a trophic cascade. At the top of the food chain, sharks are the cement of ocean ecosystems. Without them, the life aquatic crumbles, robbing millions who eat from the sea of both their livelihood and primary source of protein.

When thinking about sharks in danger what images come to mind? Generally, it’s gut-punching shots of finned sharks breathing their last on the ocean floor, unscrupulous knife-wielding fishermen or bowls of nefarious shark-fin soup bubbling in Asian countries far, far away. That was my mental picture at the start of this journey.

Between 2000 and 2008 the net combined shark tonnage reported by four EU member states was higher than the world’s number one shark fishing country, Indonesia. Indonesia confessed to 13.3% of the global total. Add together Spain, Portugal, France and the UK, and you get 13.4%. Spain came in at number three on the worst offenders list. For me, that was a pretty insightful bit of maths for a problem I thought happened on another continent. It felt like a story waiting to be told. Between 2000 and 2008 four EU nations were hauling in an average annual catch of 110,463 tonnes of sharks. In 2009 the combined total catch of sharks and rays for all EU states was 112,329 tonnes.