DARPA Funds Remote Control Sharks

An anonymous reader writes "From Undersea Spies: Turning Sharks into Robotic Sentries "It seems like science fiction, but the U.S. military would like to use sharks as underwater spies. The folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who dream up the future of weapons and military systems, envision squads of sharks prowling the oceans with sensors that could transmit evidence of explosives or other threats.""

Re:Now all that's missing

[msobkow]

Yeah, but the naval commanders could never pull off the pinkie-lip snear as well as they did in the movies. Plus, having a bunch of bald or balding military commanders making such comments would really freak people out. :D

Didn't they used to do the same thing with dolphins back in the 1960's-70's? IIRC animal rights activists objected to the bottlenose being trained to carry bombs.

Yikes! The US military was training sea life to be suicide terrorist bombers! :eek:

Re:it used to be dolphins

[Hal_Porter]

Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.

They're not training them, they're remote controlling them

http://www.bu.edu/alumni/buforward/archives/Dec_20 06/articles/spies.html [bu.edu]

DARPA turned to Jelle Atema, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of biology at the Boston University Marine Program, who for many years has been researching how marine animals use their sense of smell. Atema proposed that because sharks are expert at tracking odors over very long distances, the key to steering a shark was to follow its nose. With more than a year of DARPA funding, which ended last year, Atema was able to use electrical stimulation of a sharks brain, mimicking odor, to guide the shark around a large tank.

So the simplicity of the shark's brain is actually an advantage. From the shark's point of view, it's chasing the smell, presumably, of prey.

Interestingly, something like this happens naturally. Parasitic wasps perform brain surgery to zombify roaches.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/03/wasp_performs _roachb.html [boingboing.net]

Makes you wonder if you could do it with higher animals actually. Even though we seem to have aa certain amount of free will about how we achieve our objectives of eating and reproducing and avoiding pain, there's probably low level hardware in our the oldest parts of our brains which enforces those objectives by sending reward/punishment signals 'up' to the high level, conscious bits of our brains. I can imagine that if you attached electrodes in the right places, you could run mammals and even humans in remote controlled zombie mode too. It would be a hellish experience though, since you'd know your free will had been strongly curtailed.

Still, look on the bright side, most /.'s seem to be quite skilled at ignoring the signals from their cerebellum to reproduce. So long as the evil scientists don't wire the neurons that reward you for successfully finding carbohydrate based junk food we should be immune.

Re:it used to be dolphins

[darkfire5252]

They already solved that problem [slashdot.org].

By using electricity to manipulate the nerves in the inner ear in the same way that the scientists are manipulating the nerves in the nose, scientists were able to make a person feel like they had to go a certain direction in order to keep their balance.

Re:Now all that's missing

[raphae]

Elaborate please...

Sure I'll elaborate: think of all the experimentation it took to figure this out. How many times did the sickos cut open the skulls of sentient beings and mess around with their brains to get the results they wanted? How many failed experiments were there? How many grotesque atrocities were perpetrated in the operating room? Its not too hard to visualize the animal laying there on an operating table with its skull cut open and blood and brains everywhere while these "researchers" slopped about. Its absolutely horrific.

And sorry, because a shark is a (very well-designed) predator that sometimes (but only rarely overall) attacks humans in no way excuses such ghastly abuse of other living organisms nor violation of their fundamental sanctity as beings.