Tuesday, April 8, 2003

USED FOR MILITARY PORPOISES: Would you like to know more about the United States Navy Marine Mammal Program, previously addressed on this very page?

Click here for the program's official website, and here for a good feature piece in yesterday's WaPo:
The specially trained Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are the seafaring equivalent of bomb-sniffing dogs. Working with a human diver team and an unmanned underwater vehicle, they use biological echolocation sonar -- which sounds like clicking to humans -- to locate mines at great distances and in dark waters. They're far more effective at it than human divers.

"They have a substantially greater capability to view large areas and filter out rocks and bathtubs and junk to find only the thing you are looking for," says [Tom LaPuzza, Navy public affairs officer for the Marine Mammal Program].

The dolphins are usually fitted with cameras to transmit underwater scenes to their handlers to further eliminate false alarms. When they find a mine, they report back to the boat and go to the "I've found something" rubber ball dangling from the front; the "nothing's out there" ball dangles from the back. Their handlers then decide whether to send the dolphin back to mark near the mine with a small float so human divers can blow up the mine.

However, the dolphins have not been trained to kill. Yet.



(Yes, I know that's a sea lion. They also do underwater search missions.)

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