Conservationists and law enforcement have struggled to catch the Walter Whites behind wildlife trafficking. But could some plastic eggs and GPS trackers change the game?

Sometimes life really does imitate art. In the fourth season of the hit TV show, Breaking Bad, police put GPS devices on barrels of methylamine to try and track the show’s protagonists to their meth lab. Inspired by the episode, Kim Williams-Guillen, a conservationist with Paso Pacifico, decided to take the concept one step further: what if you could catch wildlife poachers by slipping GPS devices into convincingly faked wildlife parts? In this case: Hollywood-inspired, high-tech sea turtle eggs; fake eggs so convincingly crafted that poachers would have a hard time distinguishing them from the real thing.

“Every year millions of sea turtle eggs are taken by poachers for sale on the black market. Paso Pacifico’s solution has the potential to reveal the trade routes and destination markets for trafficked sea turtle eggs,” the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said.

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Source: Guardian Environment