Biologist Helen Pheasey knew that on a typical night it would take a sea turtle around twenty minutes to lay her eggs, which gave the scientist plenty of time to sneak one extra, very special egg into the reptile’s nest. Pheasey was also aware that poachers would likely arrive that night or the next to swipe sea turtle eggs, which are rumored to have aphrodisiac qualities and are sold on the black market as food. But Pheasey’s egg wasn’t going to be anyone’s snack: it was a plastic copycat that had a tracker hidden inside.
She and her team were the first to use the covert tracking device, called the InvestEGGator, in an effort to reveal illegal trade networks and better understand what drives sea turtle egg poaching. The scientists deployed around a hundred of the fake eggs in sea turtle nests across four beaches in Costa Rica and waited. Each egg contained a GPS transmitter set to ping cell towers every hour, which would allow scientists to follow the InvestEGGator eggs on a smartphone app.
To capture the right feel, Williams-Guillén’s 3-D printed a shell out of a plastic material called NinjaFlex. She even incorporated a dimple into the shell’s design, a characteristic of young, healthy sea turtle eggs.
“Once are covered in the mucus that comes from the nesting process and the sand is covering them, it’s very, very hard to distinguish between one or the other,” she says. It also helps that poachers usually work quickly, and in the dark.
Her team placed InvestEGGators in 101 different nests of both green sea turtles and olive ridley sea turtles across Costa Rica. Most eggs went unpoached, and the trackers were later retrieved by scientists. Of the nests containing decoy eggs, a quarter were illegally harvested. Some of the eggs failed to connect to a GPS signal, while other eggs were spotted by poachers and tossed aside. Five of those poached eggs gave the team useful tracking data.
Two of the InvestEGGators moved slightly more than a mile, to local bars or private residences. The longest voyage was around 85 miles, which Pheasey recalls watching on her phone over the course of two days. “It just kept moving,” she says. First, Pheasey saw the egg stop behind a grocery store. The next day the egg moved inland to a private residence, which Pheasey thinks was its final destination.
This illegal trade network revealed that eggs are sold and consumed locally, something Pheasey says they suspected based on anecdotal evidence. The routes they discovered also suggest that most egg poachers in the area are individuals looking to make quick money, not an organized network.
The poachers who picked up InvestEGGators will never be prosecuted. “The aim of these decoys isn’t to penalize those people,” says Pheasey. “What we’re more interested in is, okay, what patterns do we get from this?”
For example, if eggs are being poached and eaten in the same small town, conservationists know where to spend time and energy with education and support.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/3-d-printed-sea-turtle-eggs-reveal-poaching-routes-180975991/