It took six nights to catch the perpetrator, authorities say.
From sunup to sundown, wildlife officers scoured the beaches of Jupiter Island.
It was on a Friday night this month when officers Phil Stone and Ryan Church spotted the man they say was stealing sea turtle eggs. Stone, behind mosquito-infested bushes and using night-vision goggles, whispered to Church to get low on the sand.
The officers then ran toward the man and nabbed him.
It marked the first arrest in a turtle egg theft this year in South Florida, which has the biggest market in the state for the illegal trade, wildlife officials said.
The crooks have an abundance of nests to pluck from across the region, authorities said. And there’s also cultural demand: South Florida is a melting pot with people from all over the world, and sea turtle eggs are considered a delicacy and aphrodisiac in various cultures.
Though arrests are few and far between, an estimated tens of thousands of sea turtle eggs are stolen each year, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Only about one in 10 poachers, who sell the loot for $3 to $5 per egg, is caught, the agency said.
This month’s arrest was the first time in 20 years a poacher was caught red-handed on the beach, in the act of digging up sea turtle nests, said Stone, who started working at the wildlife commission in 2009.
“This is the Super Bowl of catches,” said Stone, 43.
Authorities said they found Glenn Robert Shaw, 49, of Tequesta, holding what appeared to be a grocery bag filled with sea turtle eggs, all the size of pingpong balls. When Shaw saw the officers, he threw the eggs into the sand and tried to bury them, the officers said.
He was charged with destroying, selling or molesting turtle eggs or nests, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Reached by the Sun Sentinel for comment, Shaw said he would talk later. Afterward, he could not be reached.
In all, the man tampered with 107 eggs, his loot worth about $428 on the streets, officials said.
The wildlife agency kept 15 of the eggs for evidence and DNA testing, while biologists reburied the remaining 92 eggs, hopeful they have a 50-50 chance of hatching, Capt. Jeff Ardelean said.
Shaw is just one poacher in about 42 recorded incidents since 1980, Ardelean said.
Seeing a demand
Ardelean, 60, who has tracked the poaching for 35 years, said there’s a market for turtle eggs, partly because of the sheer number of egg nests in the region.
Of Florida’s 128,129 nests counted last year, almost half were in Broward, Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties.
Ardelean said he has seen instances of trading, buying and stealing in cities such as Riviera Beach and West Palm Beach.
The demand for sea turtle eggs dates to the 1950s and 1960s, when it was legal to nab them from Florida beaches, Ardelean said. But when the Endangered Species Act of 1973 made it unlawful, the black market came into existence, he said.
Ardelean’s investigative team, which consists of 12 people, has driven to gas stations and bars to ask about sea turtle eggs and, as part of undercover stings, has bought them from dealers. “They know you’re not talking about chicken eggs,” he said.
Some who deal in stolen eggs hire others to do the digging for them, Ardelean said. Those who dig “get $100 for the nest or whatever,” and the person who does the selling ultimately gets hundreds of dollars for the eggs, Ardelean said.
The eggs are sold out of coolers in the back of trucks, houses or vacant lots. They come in brown paper bags, giant zip-close bags or even egg cartons.
Some call it a delicacy
Many countries ban harvesting sea turtle eggs for food, but according to the wildlife commission, regulations are not well enforced abroad. In some parts of the Caribbean, the sea turtle egg trade is legal, and South Florida’s culturally diverse community still views it as a delicacy, the agency said.
“It just goes back to their heritage,” Ardelean said. “They grew up by the ocean and they thrive by the ocean and what’s there to eat.
“And, they’re here, they’re available; it’s something that’s been passed on for the generation.”
Some prefer to boil the eggs for a short minute, peel off a small hole at the top and slurp the entire contents in one motion. “A lot of people believe they have aphrodisiac values, sexual enhancement powers, and from what I understand, it makes a lighter, fluffier, cakier pastry,” Ardelean said.
Turtle nests, also known as clutches, are made by green, loggerhead and leatherback turtles in South Florida. Each clutch has 75 to 125 eggs. Poachers are usually caught with two to three nests, according to the FWC.
Helpful volunteers
When investigators recover eggs, they rely on help from turtle experts, such as 63-year-old Debbie Sobel, the founder and president of the Sea Turtle Conservation League.
In the wee hours of the night, summoned by investigators, she’ll leave her home in Jupiter to dig up nests and relocate the eggs that were confiscated from poachers.
When she first started volunteering in 1996 and in the years that followed, she saw evidence of poachers every day during the peak of turtle nesting season.
Some thieves cover their tracks, kicking sand over a nest. Some leave footprints and the imprints of buckets in the sand. “Most of the poachers don’t realize how much information they’re leaving,” Sobel said. “I had nicknames for some of the patterns I would see.”
In one case, she recalls seeing two different-sized footprints in the sand, a sign of culprits who always poached eggs together. “I called them Big Foot and Little Foot,” she said, laughing.
They got away with it for a while, but officers later notified Sobel of their capture, she said. Big Foot was Size 14, they told her.
Just before sunrise Friday morning on Singer Island, Sobel began her nearly mile-and-a-half trek along the south end.
She counted seven new nests, and elsewhere, other eggs had hatched. It was a good morning for the turtles, she said.
They were all safe.
brerickson@sunsentinel.com, or Twitter @brianarerick
Past turtle cases
Through the years, authorities in South Florida have made several egg-poaching arrests. Here’s a look at some past cases:
* Alvin George Keel, of Palm Beach County, was arrested eight times — four times in a two-month period in 1989 — with at least 500 eggs at any given time, authorities said. In 1998, U.S. District Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley sentenced Keel to five years in federal prison. In 2004, in a separate case, he was sentenced to another five years.
* James Odel McGriff sold undercover officers a dozen eggs for $30 in 2002 outside his home in Riviera Beach. Five-gallon plastic buckets with more than 300 eggs were found inside his gray truck, amounting to a potential value of almost $1,000. McGriff was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison. In 2014, authorities detained him with 299 turtle eggs in a white backpack on Hutchinson Island in St. Lucie County. He was sentenced to 14 months and ordered not to travel east of the Intracoastal Waterway while on three years’ supervised release.
* James Bivens was ordered to pay $109,300 in 1990 for stealing 1,088 sea turtle eggs from the John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. Bivens was the first person in Florida to be fined under an obscure state law allowing a fine of $100 “per unit of marine life.” A federal appeals court overturned the ruling a year later, saying the fine was over the limit allowed by law.
