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