[Infowarrior] - Turning Sharks into Robotic Sentries

[Richard Forno]

Undersea Spies
Turning Sharks into Robotic Sentries
By Chris Berdik

http://www.bu.edu/alumni/buforward/archives/Dec_2006/articles/spies.html

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.

The military use of marine animals isn¹t new. For decades, the navy has used
dolphins and sea lions to patrol harbors, salvage expensive hardware, and
locate potential sea mines. Indeed, mounting chemical, auditory, or visual
sensors on a shark is the easy part. The challenge is finding a way to steer
sharks over long distances. Over millions of years, sharks have evolved to
pursue one particular target of opportunity ‹ lunch ‹ and military
commanders would need a way to override that instinct in order to dispatch
their shark spies to areas of strategic interest.

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 shark¹s brain, mimicking odor, to guide the shark around a
large tank.

The military has since made the research classified, and it is now run out
of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. But Atema is seeking
new funding sources to continue his work on sharks, with potential civilian
applications in mind ‹ such as tracking fish populations, changes in ocean
temperatures, or chemical spills.