Turtle poaching has been a serious problem for a long time now. The creative conservation organization, Paso Pacífico, has utilized concepts from the popular television show Breaking Bad to thoroughly track illegal turtle egg poachers.
The devices they have created are called InvestEggators – which is brilliant! Scientist Dr. Kim Williams-Guillén was the brains behind combining the trials of Walter White with the urgency to track turtle egg poachers down. Williams-Guillén explains:
In Breaking Bad, the DEA places a GPS tracking device on a tank of chemicals to see who receives the chemicals. Turtle eggs basically look like ping pong balls, and we wanted to know where they were going, put those two ideas together and you have the InvestEggator.
This sounds so amazing! To make things even more impressive, Paso Pacífico itself explained that the applications and research of this whole effort are led by women scientists including: Dr. Kim Williams-Guillén, Dr. Helen Pheasey, and Dr. Sarah Otterstrom.
Disguising these GPS trackers/InvestEggators as objects that appear to be turtle shells placed in the sand allows the unwanted poachers to greedily grab them.
This action can show the scientists where the poachers are taking the eggs and where they are ending up. This can tell them what restaurants the eggs are being delivered to – in Central America, sea turtle eggs are a delicacy.
101 InvestEggators were placed along four different beaches in Costa Rica. Due to the intensity of poaching, a quarter of the eggs were already snatched before the tracking began! This further proves the need for scientists to find where these eggs are going so they can get to the bottom of the issue!
To learn more and see what you can do to help, check out the InvestEggator website as well as Paso Pacífico’s website! If you found this article interesting, check out this one on Apple’s future ‘self-healing’ phone.
