March 17, 2005
Abalone Poachers and Cell Phones
An article by the Chicago Tribune gives interesting insight on a stretch of coast east of Cape Town where inhabits the world's last big concentrations of commercial abalone - a rare giant sea snail, which is considered a delicacy in Asia and an aphrodisiac in China, and which is subject to poaching on an alarming scale, fueled and fought by new technologies - used both by the anti-poaching squads as well as the poachers.
This is the interesting tidbit related to cell phones - to be filed under trivia, or one more way people use cell phones:
"Poachers tuck cell phones - set on vibrate and tied inside condoms - inside their wetsuits. When lookouts working with the poachers spot police, they simply phone, and the divers, who already are hard to spot in the bobbing kelp beds where they work, vanish underwater.
At times hundreds of divers converge on abalone hot spots, ensuring that even if police arrest a few, the majority will get away."
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