Saving Sea Turtles with the Help of GPS Tracking
19 Jul 2017
If you’re a sea turtle in these times, it can be difficult. Pollution threatens you. You can get caught in fishing nets. And you can die from ingesting plastic. Coastal development is destroying your habitat, and you may not be able to make it to a nesting beach because seawalls cut off your paths. On top of all this, you even have to worry about egg poachers.
Each year, the Nicaragua beaches become one of the few spots in the world where sea turtles travel to lay their eggs together all at once. Unfortunately, each year there’s also millions of turtle eggs stolen by egg poachers from these beaches and sold on the black market. Eventually, people consume the eggs in restaurants and bars. Many people consider the eggs aphrodisiacs.
An environmental group called Paso Pacifico works hard to protect the Nicaragua nesting sea turtles, and conservationist, Kim Williams-Guillen who works there, is no different. Paso Pacifico has offices both in Nicaragua and the United States.
Williams-Guillen created a prototype fake sea turtle egg that had a GPS tracking device inside. Her intent was to put the fake egg in a turtle nest and track where the eggs went if poachers stole it and who are involved in the trade.
The U.S. Agency for International Development gave Paso Pacifico a $10,000 grant to put this scheme in place.
The people who work as “middlemen” and receive the eggs and those that transfer the eggs across international borders and to larger areas are often associated with criminal activity. According to Sarah Otterstrom, the CEO of Paso Pacifico, they’re concerned with those wildlife criminals and traders.
This is where the prototype fake eggs come in.
Williams-Guillen creates the eggs herself from her Ann Arbor, Michigan home using her 3-D printer.
It will be hard for poachers to tell the difference when the fake eggs are slipped in with real eggs, covered in sea turtle goop and covered with sand, particularly since it’s usually dark when poaching occurs.
Poachers like to head to remote beaches since they’re harder to find and surrounded by lots of cover and forest.
Paso Pacifico hopes to add hundreds more of the fake eggs this summer in the field. They plan to have tourists and locals plant them. Costa Rica has a similar project going on which is another turtle nesting hotspot. Paso Pacifico realizes that the poachers will eventually discover the fake eggs; therefore they want to get as much location data as they can before that happens.
As soon as the conservation group has enough data regarding the trade routes, they plan to share this data with international and local law enforcement that will hopefully lead to stings or arrests.
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