Equipped with antennas, around 20 specialist volunteers are on the lookout for the creatures with black and yellow-patterned carapaces still in the area in southern France, home to 241 protected species.
The trial has opened in Aix-en-Provence of nine people, including two former French military pilots, a customs officer and a celebrity bodyguard, accused of running a trans-Atlantic cocaine smuggling scam between the Dominican Republic and France using a Dassault executive jet, in a case marked by intrigue and derring-do escapes.
Saad Lamjarred, a Moroccan singer and a star in his home country who fled bail in the US after being charged with beating and raping a woman in New York in 2010, and who was accused of another rape of a woman in Paris in 2016, has been refused bail on appeal after he was arrested in France for the alleged rape of a woman in the Rivierra resort of Saint-Tropez.
The popular Moroccan singer Saad Lamjarre, whose 2015 hit Lmaallem has become the most-viewed song by an Arab artist on YouTube, and who also jumped bail on rape charges in the US in 2010, has been detained in France after a third accusation of rape lodged against him, this time by a woman who says he forced himself upon her in a hotel in Saint-Tropez.