Finally, it was time for a field test.“I was actually the person who put the eggs in the nest.”Helen Pheasey of the University of Kent.“So it was really a case of deploying a load of decoys into the nests and seeing what happens when they get taken.”Pheasey planted a decoy egg in 101 sea turtle nests on four Costa Rican beaches.About a quarter of the decoys got snatched.Some malfunctioned, but others gave a trackable signal.One wound up at a bar about a mile away.But another traveled an impressive 85 miles from its nest.Pheasey kept an eye on its progress from her cell phone.“And I basically watched this egg moving further and further in land. And eventually it stopped.So I zoomed in on, like google maps basically, and it showed me very clearly that it had gone behind a supermarket, like some back alley supermarket loading bay kind of area.Which was pretty suspicious.There’s no reason to really be there unless you’re up to no good.”The decoy hung around the loading dock for a time before making its way to a nearby residential property.“The fact that it spent two days in sort of waiting suggests that it may have been handed over to a trafficker.”Who sold it to someone else, perhaps even the consumer.“That really fits with what we know about the illegal trade of eggs in Costa Rica.You know, we know from anecdotal information and from interview information that eggs are sold door to door.And it seems very likely that this is what happened.
