US Navy wants to retire its minehunting dolphins, but tech hasn’t caught up yet

US Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions to detect undersea threats since the 1960s, but wants to replace them with drones and other new sensors

But those dolphins and sea lions can still do their jobs better than that new technology

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A highly trained bottlenose dolphin wears a harness equipped with a camera and sonar devices for it’s mission to find enemy mines. Photo: Los Angeles Times/TNS/File

Published: 2:22am, 5 Jan 2023Updated: 3:20am, 5 Jan 2023

Since 1959, the US Navy has trained a small force of bottlenose dolphins and sea lions to recover lost equipment, intercept intruders in ports, and detect buried sea mines.

This year, the US Navy sought to end one of those marine mammals’ most important missions – hunting for and neutralising mines buried in the seabed – and use sophisticated underwater vehicles and sensors instead.

But there’s a problem: That technology has not yet equalled a dolphin’s unique ability to find mines.

So US Congress balked, using the 2023 defence bill to bar the Navy from retiring its mine-detecting dolphins or ending port-security training for its marine mammals until it deploys new mine-countermeasure systems that are as good or better.

For now, technology cannot do everything the animals can

Darian Wilson, NIWC-Pacific spokesman

The US Congress’ move halts the long-planned retirement of Marine Mammal Systems, a programme run by Naval Information Warfare Center-Pacific at Point Loma Naval Base in San Diego, California.

The proliferation of high-quality, relatively inexpensive drones means that the US Navy’s dolphins and sea lions may soon be deactivated, but for now they remain a part of the service’s mine-countermeasures systems, alongside ships, helicopters, sonars, and mobile explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams.