Wired Fish Monitor Water Toxins

boustrophedon writes "First miners used canaries to detect bad air. Now USA Today reports that municipalities monitor water quality by monitoring fish. The Bio-Sensor is a standard rack with eight 500 ml compartments, each containing a fish and a submerged sensor to detect a microvolt level bioelectric field. 'If at least six of the eight show signs of distress [typically due to a toxic condition], the Bio-Sensor sounds an alarm. It immediately saves a sample of the water (for more detailed analysis) while it notifies the humans in charge.'"

Comments

In the subcontinent

[vijaya_chandra]

Efforts like this won't work in our place back in India and the fish used for testing are guaranteed to suffocate within a minute in most of the water bodies.

The main problem actually in most of the areas is due to faulty distribution systems from the water-treating plants to the houses, where in some cases, the pipelines develop cracks letting stuff inside and sewage pipes (in case there are any) find a way to pass on some of their contents to the water pipelines.

sensors

[ryanelm]

the best sensors that exist, as far as we know, are biological. in fact, the technology boom started 4 billion years ago. We will

• never

build a more advanced machine than a cell, the real challenge is to learn how to program the abundant hardware lying around to do something useful. these fish are a step in that direction.