Sea turtles have swum the world’s oceans for over 100 million years, but today they are threatened by poaching. Throughout the tropics they come onto beaches to nest every year, making them easy prey for poachers. In Costa Rica, turtle eggs are eaten as a snack or street food. Eating turtle eggs and meat is illegal but the police rarely make arrests.
Paso Pacifico, a non-governmental organisation in California, has invented a tool that enables conservation groups to track poachers – the InvestEGGator. This 3D-printed decoy turtle egg contains a GPS tracking device. The decoy egg is the same size, weight and texture as the real thing, so can be hidden in a nest of real turtle eggs. I ran the first field trial on four beaches in Costa Rica. I wanted to test the technology and see if the poachers would actually take the bait. By crawling up behind a turtle and slipping a decoy into the nest while the turtle was laying, I was able to place decoys into 101 nests vulnerable to poaching. Then I waited for a nest to be poached and the decoy to come online.
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