Everyone is familiar with security patrol dogs. You may even know that because of their exceptionally keen sense of smell, dogs like beagles are also used to detect drugs and bombs, or land mines.
However, dogs aren't that effective in assisting coastal defense efforts, especially underwater.
Sea mines are sophisticated, expensive weapons that are designed to work in the ocean where they can sink ships, destroy landing craft, and kill or injure personnel. Sea mines are made so that they cannot be set off easily by wave action or marine animals growing on or bumping into them. If undetected, sea mines can be deadly, destructive weapons.
So what's the Navy to do?
Well, just as the dog's keen sense of smell makes it ideal for detecting land mines, the U.S. Navy has found that the biological sonar of dolphins, called echolocation, makes them uniquely effective at locating sea mines so they can be avoided or removed. Other marine mammals like the California sea lion also have demonstrated the ability to mark and retrieve objects for the Navy in the ocean. In fact, marine mammals are so important to the Navy that there is an entire program dedicated to studying, training, and deploying them. It is appropriately called the Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP).
In addition to mine detection, the Fleet's operational Marine Mammal Systems (MMS) uses dolphins and sea lions to find and mark the location of underwater objects. Dolphins are essential because their exceptional biological sonar is unmatched by hardware sonars in detecting objects in the water column and on the sea floor. Sea lions are used because they have very sensitive underwater directional hearing and exceptional vision in low light conditions. Both of these marine mammal species are trainable for tasks and are capable of repetitive deep diving.
Some of the objects the animals find are expensive to replace. Others could present a danger to Navy personnel and vessels. The dolphins and sea lions work under the care and close supervision of their handlers and are generally trained for a particular operational capability called a "system." These human/animal teams can be deployed within 72 hours of notice and can be rapidly transported by ship, aircraft, helicopter, and land vehicles to potential regional conflict or staging areas all over the world and regularly participate in major exercises.
These animals are released almost daily untethered into the open ocean, and since the program began, only a few animals have not returned.
The development, training, veterinary care and research facility that supports today's Navy Marine Mammal Program is centered in the Biosciences Division at SSC Pacific. The Navy's work with marine mammals has been ongoing for many years, beginning in the late 1950s when the Navy began to study the unique attributes of marine mammals such as the hydrodynamics of the dolphin. By understanding how dolphins move in the water, perhaps the Navy could improve torpedo, ship and submarine designs. Soon the Navy realized that dolphins would be valuable assistants to Navy divers working in the open ocean. Unlike human divers, dolphins are capable of making repeated deep dives without experiencing "the bends," or decompression sickness. They also found that dolphins and sea lions are highly reliable, adaptable and trainable marine animals that could be conditioned to search for, detect and mark the location of objects in the water.
Today, bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions continue to perform a number of important functions such as protecting ports and Navy assets from swimmer attack, locating and attaching recovery hardware to expensive exercise and training targets, and locating potentially dangerous sea mines.
For more on this unique partnership, check out the Navy's Marine Mammal Program page
