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

Now all they need to do

[TykeClone]

is to put lasers on their freaking heads.

Is that too much to ask?

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.

Tech Review

[lysander]

The Technology Review had an article about this (or a similar system) a few months ago. They described the system a bit more -- I believe it's being used to monitor NYC's water. That article also mentions that the fish are only in the monitor for six weeks at a time, which may or may not make you feel better about animal cruelty concerns.

Swimming Sentinels - February 29, 2004
David Talbot
Fish enlisted in protecting water supplies from toxins

This is an automated version of an old idea

[WayneConrad]

This is an automated version of an idea that's been around awhile. When I was doing a computer installation for a water plant in Yuma, Arizona, maybe 8 years ago, I saw a fish tank in the control room. They fed a continuous supply of the plant's water through that tank. If the fish started acting funny or floated upside down, they would know to issue an alert and start testing water quality right now. It wasn't a substitute for laboratory testing of the water, but an adjunct to it. You can only do lab tests every so often, but fish are testing the water all the time.

Even if they won't detect everything, fish are cheap, and that's important to the smaller water plants. Besides, the fish give the plant operator something to look at in between doing preventative maintenance and studying for the certification. Running a water plant is boring.

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.