Fake turtle eggs against illegal trafficking

Brut America

Meanwhile in Costa Rica, this organization has found an innovative way to fight illegal trafficking of sea turtle eggs…

Transcript

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00:33In a lot of countries where people eat turtle eggs,

00:36it's considered a delicacy.

00:38I think in the case of Costa Rica, it's slightly different.

00:40These eggs don't have a huge monetary value.

00:43They are a cheap sort of snack or street food, if you like.

00:49We know that some eggs are being sold door to door,

00:51but we also are suspicious that they're getting into towns and cities.

00:54Now, if we know that they're coming into towns and cities

00:57and we have maybe patterns of behaviour,

00:59that's an opportunity to actually be waiting for people to arrive with the eggs,

01:03rather than always being behind them and sort of counting the losses.

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01:21What they came up with,

01:23kind of with the help of the TV show Breaking Bad and also The Wire,

01:28because in Breaking Bad what they did was they placed a GPS tracking device

01:32on a tanker of chemicals,

01:34so they could follow where the drug cartels were moving around.

01:37And in The Wire, they did a similar thing.

01:39They put a sound recorder in a tennis ball,

01:41so they could listen to drug dealers.

01:43And this kind of created this idea of like,

01:46what if we put a tracking device inside a turtle egg?

01:50Like the technology is small enough to do that now.

01:53So it's essentially the same technology as your mobile phone.

01:56So it has like a SIM card and a charging port

01:59and it basically will give off a GPS or an SMS signal,

02:03depending on where it is.

02:05The projects came together beautifully.

02:07And, yeah, I started putting eggs out at the Kanyupama Biological Station,

02:11the beach where they're working,

02:13and put those out into green turtle nests

02:17with the aim of finding out if this technology will even work.

02:44This isn't a one-solution-fits-all approach.

02:48We're not specifically looking to target people

02:52that are actually actively removing eggs from the beach.

02:55To be honest, we kind of know who those people are.

02:57What we want to do is to prevent that happening in the first place.

03:01We're really doing a lot of education work,

03:03but also if these decoys can act as a deterrent

03:08to people taking them out to the beach or trafficking the eggs,

03:11which is the much bigger issue that we're interested in,

03:13that's where it comes into its own.

03:16That's where we've got a lot of potential there.

03:18Now that this technology is small enough

03:20and it's becoming more and more accurate,

03:22there's so many more opportunities that this opens up.

03:25This could be used for different species, such as shark fins.

03:28It could be used for parrot eggs.

03:30It's really anything that you want to track,

03:33the technology's there now,

03:35and it's only going to keep getting better.

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