Officials at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport have found 36 plastic bags of baby eels hidden in suitcases destined for China.

The bags of eels, weighing a total of 72 kilos, would have been worth some €115,000 if they had reached their goal, the Dutch product safety board said in a statement.

A man and a woman who checked the suitcases in at the airport were arrested on Monday.

The European eel population is under severe threat and have been an officially protected species since 2009. According to some estimates, the population has shrunk by as much as 90%.

The eels being smuggled to China were at the the ‘glass eel’ stage of their development. Eel larvae reach the glass eel stage at the end of their migration across the Atlantic when they re-enter coastal estuaries and head upstream.