Navy replacing mine-finding dolphins with robots starting 2017 - Jonas Portillo

In a bit of good news for dolphins – but bad news for robots – the Navy's roster of mine-hunting marine mammals is going to be replaced by unmanned underwater vehicles starting in 2017. The reason? It's not that the Navy's team of 24 mine-hunting dolphins is doing a bad job. It's just that it's a lot easier to manufacture and program a, "12-foot, torpedo-shaped robot," as reported by the San Diego Sea Tribune, than it is to stick a dolphin in a multi-year training program. That, and we presume it's a lot easier on the conscience if a hunk of lifeless parts gets blown up versus a… well, anyway. It's not as if the specially trained dolphins are being given a pink slip and sent out to a watery pasture. Rather, it's likely that the 24 mine-hunting dolphins – of 80 total dolphins within the Navy's $24 million marine mammal program – will be reassigned to different aquatic tasks. It's also possible that the dolphins might be retained to find bombs placed on the bottom of a body of water, a different kind of mine hunting that could still make use of the dolphins' unique skills. As for the logistics of mine hunting as a dolphin, we'll leave that to the Navy's website for the Marine Mammal Program, which describes the dolphins' capabilities in charming detail: "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. But a dog would not be effective in finding a sea mine," reads the Navy's site(describing a fairly obvious fact). "But 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." Now that the Navy can equip its underwater, robotic vehicles with a low-frequency broadband sonar – as reported by the Navy Times – the machines can effectively perform a similar task at a greater range, for longer times, without the need of a manned support boat for surface-based assistance. That said, some Navy officials still seem to have a certain fondness for mammals over machines. "The dolphins are phenomenal. Even with technology, we'll probably never come up with the ... level of intelligence to discern all of those things," said Ed Ebinger, deputy head of the Navy Expeditionary Combat Branch, in an interview with the Navy Times.