EnglishBy Jason G. Goldman
As the sun sets on the beaches of Costa Rica’s Pacific coastline, a man walks along looking for comma-shaped scoop marks in the sand, the telltale sign of a nesting sea turtle. He follows a set of tracks from the water’s edge until they stop. That’s where he starts digging. Eventually, he uncovers a hundred or more leathery eggs, each the size of a ping-pong ball. Inside each of the eggs is a small gamble. Around one percent of the eggs on any beach will survive long enough to hatch, and around one percent of those hatchlings will survive long enough to reproduce themselves as adults. Each of the world’s seven sea turtle species are considered endangered, giving each egg a vital role to play in their future.
It is illegal in Costa Rica to remove sea turtle eggs from the beach, but this is something the man has been doing his whole life. The same is probably true of his father, who learned it from his father, and so on. But something is different this time. In addition to the dozens of eggs he’s scooping into a bag, there’s a stowaway: a small decoy 3D-printed to look like the real thing. If you cracked it open, in place of a turtle embryo, you’d find a battery, a GPS transmitter, and a SIM card like the kind you’d find inside a cell phone.
Once each hour, the decoy egg – called an “InvestEGGator” – transmits its location to satellites orbiting the Earth, and from there, the information passes securely to the internet. University of Kent ecologist Helen Pheasey can track its movements online from anywhere on the planet.
Starting from the beach, the eggs make their way over the course of two days to the loading bay of a supermarket in the populous Central Valley region, home to some two thirds of the nation’s inhabitants. The next day, it turns up on a residential property nearby, the end of a 137-kilometer long journey. Researchers believe that the supermarket is a hand-off point, where the eggs are transferred from the poacher to a salesperson.
“It used to be thought of as an aphrodisiac,” says Pheasey, “but everyone made it a joke. They know it’s not really an aphrodisiac. It’s a food product, a seasonal treat,” she explains, the same way Americans enjoy pumpkin spice flavored treats for a few months each year. “They might fry them into an omelet, in the streets you can buy them hardboiled, and the other way is to crack them into a salsa and swallow them whole as a bar snack.”
Pheasey has spent lots of time talking with local community members, with law enforcement offers, and with the poachers themselves. She learned that sea turtle egg poaching is not like other forms of illegal wildlife trafficking. They do not drive an economy since they don’t fetch a very high price locally, and they don’t fulfill a nutritional requirement for local communities. Turtle eggs are simply something on which Costa Ricans have always enjoyed snacking, and poachers are just after a quick, easy payday.
Paso Pacifico scientist Kim Williams-Guillen, who invented the InvestEGGator, has spent the last few years field testing her prototypes to be sure that the sensitive electronics inside could hold up to real life conditions on wet, sandy, tropical beaches – and to confirm that the decoys looked enough like the real thing to escape detection by poachers.
Pheasey agreed to run the first comprehensive field trial as part of her dissertation research. In all, she and her team secretly inserted decoys into 101 turtle nests on four beaches in Costa Rica – three on the Pacific and one on the Caribbean – including those of olive ridley, green, and loggerhead sea turtles.
Around twenty-five percent of the decoys were poached, allowing the researchers to track the movements of five clutches. Though that is a small number, Pheasey says it still provides useful insight into the local trade networks for turtle eggs. For example, she discovered that poached eggs in Costa Rica seem to stay in local communities; they do not cross borders or enter into international trafficking rings.
The decoys that remained on the beaches were helpful too. After the turtles hatched, the researchers returned to each nest, to verify that the decoys themselves didn’t impose any negative consequences on the real eggs. Indeed, Pheasey found no statistical difference in hatching success between those with and without decoys.
While more and larger field trials are clearly needed before the InvestEGGator can become a reliable strategy in the law enforcement toolbox, Pheasey is quick to point out that law enforcement must itself be only one strategy in a multifaceted approach to reducing the threat of poaching.
Rather than simply punishing those who illegally harvest eggs, she says, resources should be devoted towards prophylactic efforts like education, so that children can grow up to succeed in jobs that would render poaching unnecessary. “Preventing people from needing that quick buck is key to this,” she says. “That’s going to be much better than penalizing individuals that are struggling as it is.”