Fish Work as Anti-terror Agents

sdriver writes "San Francisco's bluegills went to work about a month ago, guarding the drinking water of more than 1 million people from substances such as cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill." The New York City Department of Environmental Protection reported at least one instance in which the system caught a toxin before it made it into the water supply."

Not the first

[ross.w]

This was done in Sydney 15 years ago, when they still drew their water supply via an open canal. The Water Board had identified a risk fronm the canal that wound its way through teh suburbs and was very easy to get access to, so they put in a fish tank connected to the canal to pick up anything toxic that might have found its way into the water. In this cas the fish were Macquarie perch (I think).

There was a video camera trained on the tank and the operators in the control room could cut off the canal if they noticed the fish were dead.

There was a guy whose job it was to feed the fish and run the dechlorination system that removed the chlorine from the water going into the tank, since that's also toxic to fish.

One weekend , he forgot to top up the sodium thiosulphate solution that was used for this purpose, and all the fish died from chlorine poisoning some time on Sunday night when it ran out.

That was bad enough, but it was Monday morning before the operators noticed.

They don't use that system anymore. The canal has been filled in and there is a pipeline and a fully filtered treatment plant.

Re:nerdy enough?

[Deathbane27]

That should unclog the tubes too!

Re:nerdy enough?

[unboring]

Clearly what we need to do is just release fish into the computer systems as well. You mean send them through the tubes?

Re:Animals as agents of terror.

[Anonymous Coward]

In WW2, the Russians trained dogs by penning them up until they got hungry and feeding them only under tanks. Then they'd release them with mines on their backs, so they'd crawl under enemy tanks and explode. Results were mixed, as the dogs would crawl under any tank, including the Russian ones that were nearby (and which were just like the ones they had been trained to run underneath).

In Roman times, war elephants were combatted by pouring oil on pigs and setting them afire, causing them to run squealing, sometimes even toward the elephants to disrupt them.

In WW1, dogs were used to lay copper telephone wire through no-man's-land, as well as messengers and supply runners.

For the current war in Iraq, Morocco offered the US its brigade of 2000 monkeys trained to detonate land mines -- presumably the hard way.

This is of course in addition to the "normal" uses of animals you'd expect: dogs sniffing out mines and enemies in Vietnam, pigeons used as messengers, horses used to ride or to haul carts, cats used to kill rats in trenches, and so on.

As far as I know, the US Navy has trained sea mammals (dolphins, sea lions) to _spot_ mines and mark them by releasing a buoy, but as a delivery mechanism.