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Fish Work as Anti-terror Agents
sdriver writes "San Francisco's bluegills went to work about a month ago, guarding the drinking water of more than 1 million people from substances such as cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill." The New York City Department of Environmental Protection reported at least one instance in which the system caught a toxin before it made it into the water supply."
*mumbles something about preferring sharks with frikkin' laser beams*
I hate printers.
How do we know this isn't a red herring by some terroist group?
*ducks and runs*
Does this mean that if you go fishing you're aiding terrorism?
Well when you think about it, they're really just super complex biological machines that built themselves so they're the perfect solution...except in my area that is. We may have the 2nd most terror targets in the US but the only thing the fish are telling us so far is that you "should not exceed eating two in one year." Looooots of PCB's in there. Terrorists could dump all sorts of stuff in there and we could be pulling up two headed fish without thinking anything was out of the ordinary :P
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
The bluegills are just sensors not guards. It's as dumb as saying one of those stupid "dogs" that bimbos like Paris Hiton carry around are guard dogs.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The name is Pond. James Pond.
So the fish caught someone pooping in the resovoir. that's awesome.
1. Catch jihadist pooping in drinking water
2. ???
3. Profit!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of bluegills! That would be amazing! Goatse man and Cowboyneal will quiver with anticipation! Meatspin will go back to 5rpm due to the awesomeness of this post!
Gotta be better than the sheep dealing with it now.
I'm hard of herring.
I'm sure the amounts that get through are tiny, but I bet people are glad to know that each glass of tap water they drink has more fish feces in it than before.
Using cyanide to poison drinking water for a major city? It would be easy to catch the guys, they'd be the ones dumping the tanker truck full of cyanide.
Plutonium would work much better.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Fish are peeing in our water supply!!!!
M0571y H@rml355.
To: Bob Thompson <bthompson@dopw.sf.ca.us>
Subject: Our Contract
Dear Bob,
We don't want to seem ungrateful and we appreciate all you've done. However, it has just come to our attention, and our solicitor's attention, that our job is to test the water for poison. In light of this we'd like to renegotiate. We're looking forward to hearing back from you ASAP concerning this issue.
Sincerely,
Tim, Ed, and Bill
The Bluegills
At the other end of the issue, we've used animals as agents of destruction in some pretty weird ways. Probably everybody here has heard of the U.S. Navy's experiments using dolphins or porpoises as a delivery system for below-the-water-line bombs targeting ships. The weirdest I've ever heard of was the Army's Bat Bomb project during WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
Does anyone here watch the History Channel (North America)? Didn't they run a documentary on this project a couple of years ago?
* * * * *
My goal is to someday be the person my dog thinks I am.
--Unknown
"And they are no use against other sorts of attacks -- say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water."
Really? Stupid fish
Just wait until the U.S. Department of Labor hears of this!
"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
-George W. Bush, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
Give credit where credit's due.
Yeah, because you took a job eating bees!
Love,
Bob
That reminds me of a similar article:
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A type of person so common that practically every American who ever attended grade school has probably harassed one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism.
San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using computer geeks -- also known as computer nerds or slashdotters -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard the internet.
Small numbers of the geeks are kept in cubicles supplied with Mountain Dew and a broadband internet connection from local internet service providers (ISPs), and sensors in each cubicle work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and browsing patterns of the geeks that occur in the presence of internet attacks.
"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the geek monitoring system. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the computer nerd."
Since September 11, the government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on the U.S. internet. Federal law requires nearly all internet service providers to assess their vulnerability to terrorism.
Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But protection systems for electronic networks can trace only the hacks they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.
Computer geeks -- a hardy species about the size of a normal human being, but thinner and paler -- are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to internet integrity, and when exposed to even brief internet outages, they experience the geek version of coughing, compulsively reloading browser windows and pinging gateways to determine the source of the congestion.
The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the geek's vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong.
The angel in the oatmeal.
Won't PETA & SPCA complain?
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
First Post Bitches!
Using animals as sensors to detect contaminants isn't exactly a new idea. Coal miners have been using canaries to detect coal damp and other noxious gases for at least a century. The only new thing is using fish instead of birds. Nice idea, though, and a lot more cost effective than trying to design something sensative enough to be useful.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Just let them volunteer to replace the bluegills. Then we can let the bluegills go.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
test comment
test sig
As someone who grew up in New Jersey, there were many lakes that had those little guys swimming all over the place...
And there isn't a change in hell that I would drink any of the water in those lakes. Those fish are survivors, and although I am not a scientist, I could only conclude that the fish in the lakes nearby had to have gone through some type of resistant mutation... That really doesn't help my confidence in the safety of the water.
I say use goldfish. Those little bastards take one day of me forgetting to feed them to go belly up.
-- The Arizona Kid
This is another example of a solution to a real problem best solved with a biological system.
These are the reasons that you can argue to the most right-wing of dextrophiles of at least the economic value in preserving biodiversity.
But still we lose 50 species per day, forever. If you don't have the technology to fix it, you should be trying not to break it.
This is also pretty standard for treated industrial wastewater--take a sample from the outflow on a regular basis, send it to a lab, and they stick fish in it and see how many die within 24 hours. Some setups even have a small side stream so that you can get results in real time.
whether the municipal water people can tell if a bluegill is tripping on LSD?
Or, for that matter, viagra.
(If anyone feels like responding "your can't trip on viagra" - that depends on how big the pill is, and whether you're looking where you're walking.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This was done in Sydney 15 years ago, when they still drew their water supply via an open canal. The Water Board had identified a risk fronm the canal that wound its way through teh suburbs and was very easy to get access to, so they put in a fish tank connected to the canal to pick up anything toxic that might have found its way into the water. In this cas the fish were Macquarie perch (I think).
There was a video camera trained on the tank and the operators in the control room could cut off the canal if they noticed the fish were dead.
There was a guy whose job it was to feed the fish and run the dechlorination system that removed the chlorine from the water going into the tank, since that's also toxic to fish.
One weekend , he forgot to top up the sodium thiosulphate solution that was used for this purpose, and all the fish died from chlorine poisoning some time on Sunday night when it ran out.
That was bad enough, but it was Monday morning before the operators noticed.
They don't use that system anymore. The canal has been filled in and there is a pipeline and a fully filtered treatment plant.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I would have picked piranas and crocodiles. The bluegills just let you know the water is poisend after which you have the large expence of finding and trialing the terrorist. My system makes it very easy: The terrorist are the little pieces of pirana feces floating in the water. Or the guy stuck in the tree above the crocodiles. Either way we save at lot of money.
This thing with the fish sounds great and all, but I'm worry about my 4th amendment rights being eroded by little birds telling my government things.
At least I can count on moles to uphold le resistance.
Have you ever tried to hold a conscious squirrel even using two hands?
If we're talking about a fully grown gray squirrel, this looks to me to be wayyyy into urban legend territory.
Tell the guy who thought this up to change it to "lighting the tail of a flying squirrel and then launching it by catapult". Seems more reasonable to me.
[[Yes, I know the details can be changed to make the story more reasonable, but then this post would be boring, no?]]
I'd like to humbly bring to your attention the little known fact that the threat to your water supply hardly comes from terrorism, but rather from industrial toxic spills. The fish are not fighting terrorism but protecting environment (please read the cited case for a good example). I am very sorry, I'm not trying to diminish the heroic efforts of your patriotic fish in anyway, they are still doing an important job. But dear allies, please try to remember that not all the bad things come from abroad in a form of bearded fundamentalist menace.
Polluters are equated to terrorists now? Brilliant! So we won't need any Erin Brockovitches to get some justice to these bastards - we can just ship them off to Guantanamo when a bluegill dies. About time, too.
Apparently the Department of Homeland Security failed to realized that they just put British bluegills in charge of our national security. (No red-blooded American bluegill would refer to their personal pondscum as a "solicitor" -- sharks are "lawyers" here, except when they're sharks) Ahh well, could have been worse... at least when the going gets tough I'd trust the British with my back. But if DHS' next bright idea is poison-sensing frogs, well, I'm marching on Washington.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
ISTM that each time "terrorism" is included as a reason to improve public safety, it's just assisting the terrorist agenda by keeping them inthe news and instilling fear where it didn't previously exist.
Better to celebrate the improvements that progress brings, rather than trying to keep everyone cowering in fear with cheap, sensationalist news copy.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Are these fitted with Laser on their heads? :-)
By the way this news is too old. I read it in print media couple of daze ago.
of a technique used by water-testing labs. Trout and Daphnia are used in the lab I consulted to once. For things with a higher ppm range trout were used, and for lower ppm concentrations Daphia (which are barely naked-eye visible) are used. The waterborne equivalent of canaries in coal mines.
The plan to use fish to detect poisons is all well and good, but ignores the very possible possibility that The Terrorists will just infiltrate fish hatcheries, use off-the-shelf DNA splicing machines to create a breed of fish which are extra-fertile and do not show signs of poisoning, and populate the waterways and resevoirs with their nefarious aquatic fish of evil. Clearly, the government must immediately initiate a program of DNA testing of all fish in all waterways to counter this threat!
Plutonium is toxic, that's true.
But the descriptions you hear all the time about how one gram can kill a bazillion people assumes that each person gets exactly a lethal dose and no more.
In reality, this is difficult to do. Plutonium, for example, is not soluble in water and is very heavy. So distributing it through the water supply would be very difficult.
If you drop a bit in the water supply, it'll just sink to the bottom in the first eddy it reaches and sit there, killing only things that come near it instead of the intended targets. It might kill nothing except a few rats.
http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Thats what this is, animal cruelty, putting them in harms way, using them as a shield.
How different is this from Human Shields that the government cried about with Saddam in the first Iraq war? No different.
What an extremely stereotypical name you have to have been on /. for so long!
for those who don't speak dutch
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The entire terror angle is complete crap. Chances of terrorism causing problems in the water supply are infinitely smaller than those that happen through other conscious and unconscious human action and the so-called Acts of God/Nature. Diesel spills are an environmental problem. Raw sewage in the water intake because of excessive rain are Acts of God/Nature etc etc. These things will be the majority of your problems. The great thing is that if you can detect these, you can detect terrorism.
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The city of Zurich (Switzerland) has been guarding its drinking water for the last 30 years with trouts.
"I cannot find the original article"
:-)
- because, they, um, have, er, clammed up?
Insert
Is this some lame attempt to link terorism to the problems cause by the farming and other industry? "Anti-terror" It soubds as if somebody is crying "Wolf" all the time.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Where's Inspector Gill now that we need him?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
And yes, it was funny. I realise he was some kind of Australian national hero, but so was Ned Kelly. If winding up alligators while holding your child is the way naturalists normally behave, I would be extremely surprised. He was certainly no Dian Fossey, and if plenty of taseless jokes encourage people to just leave stingrays alone, instead of (as some Australians seem to be doing, for some sick reason) maltreating them - well, it would be a good thing. At least Australia will now have a high profile Darwin Award winner.
Pining for the fjords
Agh, I was paraphrasing there; imho the quote actually warrents an accurate citation. What he said was more refined: "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." - see what he did there? He actually used 'human being' instead of 'human beings' as the plural as an artistic device to express the harmony between fish and men (since the plural of fish is also dindistinguishable from its singular form) thus building a symbolic linguistic bridge between both our species.
The quote is on the video at 2:22.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Did anyone else find this line funny ?
... </i>
<i>... hey are no use against other sorts of attacks -- say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers
Can detect a very wide range of compounds, can be completely automated.
Deleted
...I'm being reminded of this.
It's way worse than that. I just met GWB on the White House lawn. He said the CIA is reporting unusually many sightings of fishy A'rab looking fellas in San Francisco sporting goods stores buying scuba gear. The CIA, FBI and the NSA are now convinced that task-force 'Bluegill' has been infiltrated and that the terrorists infiltrators plan to spike the San Francisco water supply with massive amounts of LSD.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The fish are not fighting terrorism but protecting environment
If you were American, you would be accused of being unpatriotic for suggesting such a thing.
- heavy metal poisoning
- heavy metal toxicity
Plutonium is in the same league. But it would be much harder to work with because of the radioctivity. Odds are that the mules used to transport, process into something water soluable, or deliver to target would suffer and die in a what that does not go unnoticed. Kind of like that East European fellow found dying a few years ago along a W European motorway with the radioactive cargo that killed him still in the trunk. Or the empty trucks returning to Russia with very hot cargo beds...Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Bluegill A: HEARTBEAT nil, BREATHING non-existant, SWIMMING PATTERN bobbing along the top of the tank
Bluegill B: HEARTBEAT lub but still waiting for the dub, BREATHING laboured due to lungs hanging out of mouth, SWIMMING PATTERN thrashing about madly next to the castle
Bluegill C: HEARTBEAT n/a, BREATHING n/a, SWIMMING PATTERN n/a
Please note: Bluegill C exploded
Conclusion: Possible contamination of drinking supply? Will ask for second opinion when Shift Manager returns from holiday
... in many cities in Europe. This is reliable, cheap, and very, very sensitive.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Are you kidding? There is sea life that not only mates under 1 year of age, but sometimes actually changes gender! I'm expecting a Focus on the Family talking paper any day now. Don't tell them that some frogs are transexuals as well. It all started with Janet Jackson's nipple. I don't remember any of this crap happening before we had aureolas on the boob tu... well, on the television.
Judging by Bluegill B's lungs, I'd say it drowned.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
This is not an urban legend
I saw the episode that you're talking about last week. The idea seemed crazy at first, but after some research they were able to craft incredibly effective incindiary devices that were small and light enough for the bats to carry. They were so effective that when several experimental bats escaped, they promptly flew towards some of the buildings at the test facility (in Arizona or New Mexico, I belive) and wound up burning most of it down.
The idea was to outfit the bats with the devices, then induce hibernation by keeping them cool and dark so they could be transported. They also came up with this ingenious method of delivering them target which was essentially multiple layers of trays that would expand as it was parachuted near the earth allowing the bats time to warm and wake up and then wreak havoc on the target area. As another poster has said, although this idea held promise it was eventually scrubbed in favor of nuclear research.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
I love this. It's the modern equivalent of having a soup taster for the King. We think we're sooo clever.
I also like the article's forced effort to explain how the fix cannot stop the bombing of a water main or the release of germs which target humans. Clearly, the system is insufficient due to those limitations and must be replaced with a hundred million dollar project. LOL.
It's the canary in the coal mine.
Hazmat team joke: "How do you know if a scene is IDLH? (Immediately Dangerous to Live or Health).... Simple, when you get there all the cops are horizontal instead of vertical.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Does this mean we can carry water bottles on planes again -- if they have bluefish swimming in them?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Well, I have to say that the fish probably take the threat of an attack a lot more seriously than most of the people in San Francisco do.
It's right after "+1 Old Joke That Refuses To Die".
Actually it's toxicity comes from it being treated by the body like calcium. So that it gets sequestered into your bones where it sits and bombards your bone marrow with alpha particles until you die of leukemia and/or anemia.
As far as it precipitating to the bottom you are only considering metallic particles I assume. Have you ever seen silt? It stays in suspension. I'm sure there are Pu compounds that are water soluable.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Are you sure there are no Pu compunds that are water soluble? I strongly doubt it. Even lead coumpounds can be absoarbed into the bloodstream. You could even attach Pu to nanoparticles so they sit in suspension.
Pu's toxicity comes from it being treated by the body like calcium. So that it gets sequestered into your bones where it sits and bombards your bone marrow with alpha particles until you die of leukemia and/or anemia. Since it accumulates you wouldn't have to get a single dose, it could build up over days or months.
I think making it partially soluable would be even worse than 100% soluble. That way it sits in the system constantly leaching a steady stream of poison. Try to clean it up and you will create a plume of Pu. This is the same issue environmental cleanups have to face when cleaning up waterbodies that have been used as chemical dumps. The silt at the bottom acts like a chemical sink.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
At last we've managed to find the real terrorists: polluters who dump poison into our water all the time. We should catch Osama at the next board meeting of Dow Chemical.
--
make install -not war
FTA:
... so it is useless to state that. This is just continuing the fear mongering.
They do have limitations. While the bluegills have successfully detected at least 30 toxic chemicals, they cannot reliably detect germs. And they are no use against other sorts of attacks -- say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water.
Seriously people, did the author have to cover this base? I mean, who has ever heard of precognition in bluegills? Who would ever expect precognition in a fish? The purification process is designed to kill germs
I personally think they have precognition, but its that we are incapable of understanding their attempts to communicate that is the problem. We need to fund research into this, else the terrorits win!!!
Fish are actually very skilled white-hat hackers. Their only problem is a lack of an adequate input device(they have no fingers!!)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I thought it was foxes...
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I can't find a reference, but some show several years showed trout (fingerlings?) being used in Rome to test the quality of the water coming from aquaducts. Can anyone confirm or refute?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I thought Glofish, that serve a similar purpose, (see ancient /. reference somewhere) were a dynamite product. What nerd could resist a home aquarium of genetically-mutant glowing fish?
But you can hardly find them in my metro, California made them illegal and it seems like large chains like PetSmart aren't carrying them. I guess either it's a good thing I'm not in marketing or PetSmart is stupid.
Anti-terror fish? Fish that keep me from freaking out in horror flicks? Are they narcotic? How do they keep fear at bay? Do they fire darts full of tranqullizer? Do they sing happy songs? Do I get a hug when I'm feeling scared?
How exactly do you keep water free of fear, then?
Isn't the "terror" in your own heads? Hard for even a very small fish to get into your actual head. Must be bio-engineered to get in through the sinus cavity.
Does anyone else find it interesting that the following statements were made in TFA.
"They do have limitations. While the bluegills have successfully detected at least 30 toxic chemicals, they cannot reliably detect germs. And they are no use against other sorts of attacks -- say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water.
Still, Lawler said..."
Really? Fish can't detect the bombing of water mains? AMAZING I THOUGHT THE FISH COULD DO IT ALL!
Good job CNN on your dedication to high quality journalism.
"There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill."
This claim is absurd on its face. Who told him that? The guy who sold him the fish? He's obviously not an analytical chemist. Things like high-resolution mass spectrometry can detect cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides at parts-per-trillion levels, far lower than anything that could ever possibly have any sort of detectible biological effect on a fish. There is no way that a fish is going to be effected by a nanogram/liter concentration of mercury, but a good mass spec would be able to see it.
Most animals and insects have extereme sensitivty to nano amounts of chemicals. We just need to understand them make the best use of those senstivity for us.
Cross breed pirannah and flying fish. The ultimate water supply defense system!
So, one has to do some "phising" before spoiling the drinking water..
How much are we paying these "defense contractors" and who's getting the money?
In process piping projects like refineries and petroleum transmission, pigs are often used to clean out pipelines before startup (in order to detect and remove possible debris or forgotten, hungover pipefitters left over inside the pipes during construction). They are also often used to seperate two different products sent down the same pipeline.
Thankfully, most of them survive intact and unharmed (the pigs, that is).
Many of these pigs display great intelligence, so there are pig spies employed to detect and transmit their whereabouts should any of them decide to "go missing".
It's true!
I thought the San Francisco Bluegills were a minor league baseball team...