The GPS-enabled fake turtle eggs are the brainchild of Kim Williams-Guillén, an ecologist for the NGO Paso Pacifico, who lives on her own pig farm in Detroit.

In 2016, she entered a competition put together by the U.S. government that aimed to foster tech-based ideas that could expose, and stop, the illegal trade in animal parts. Hers was one of the winning ideas. Now, Williams-Guillén collaborates with Pheasey, who's testing the decoy eggs in Costa Rica.

Some of the eggs found in bars are part of Costa Rica’s heavily regulated, small legal trade, but many are sourced and sold illegally by poachers.

“You basically do a shot; they will usually do it with alcohol, but the egg itself is in a tomato salsa and chili,” says Pheasey, a conservation biologist at the University of Kent, in the UK.

Because almost all sea turtle species are endangered, that’s a practice that Pheasey and other conservationists would like to see end.

The decoy egg project is the first of its kind, Pheasey says, so she’s still figuring out how best to prepare and plant the 3D-printed eggs.

Right now, the routine goes like something like this: Every night, Pheasey places a SIM card inside each one, and charges them, so they don’t run out of battery power too soon after they’ve been taken from the nest. Then, she seals the eggs, and paints the opening so they look like the real thing. When it’s sufficiently dark out, she heads to the beach and waits for a nesting female to show up. Pheasey drops a fake egg inside the nest after the turtle has laid about half of her eggs around 45 in the case of the olive ridley sea turtles she’s been working with most recently — because that’s low enough in the nest to prevent predators from getting at it and high enough that poachers won’t leave it behind if they find the nest.