U.S. Will Use Robots to Patrol Water Supply

bl8n8r writes "By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply. Realtime environmental details will be used to help safeguard the nations drinking water. The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."

Comments

Not quite...

[KevinKnSC]

By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply.

The article only mentions a project to monitor the Seneca River, some connected lakes, and an existing system that monitors part of the water supply for New York City. That's not quite "the nation's fresh water supply," although it is certainly a promising technology.

Re:This is awesome

[shawb]

Yes, zebra mussels do CLEAR the water, but they do not CLEAN it. What they do is they remove all the sediment that other creatures oftem feed on, thus making it unavailable. However, they pass most pollutants right on (except for some heavy metals and such which they bioaccumulate like crazy, poisoning any creatures which then eat them.)

And the clearing of the water actually causes problems in and of itself. There is still a super high nutrient load in the water, and the extra light allowed in causes several noxious weeds to grow out of control, choking out most normal vegetation, destroying habitat several animals use (especially for egg laying) and choke waterways from human navigation.

While their unchecked growth in the wild does cause problens, zebra mussels could make an interesting part of a constructed bioremediation system (at least in waterways which are already infected by the zebras anyways.)

A couple of links on zebra mussels:
Wisconsin DNR
Minnesota Sea Grant
Missouri Department of Conservation
Iowa DNR

And slightly more technical link outlinking some ofthe risks of overfiltration