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."

Comments

The idea's not exactly new.

[techno-vampire]

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.

"Fishkill" test

[Barbarian]

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.

very difficult to make that effective

[YesIAmAScript]

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/