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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.
I'm hard of herring.
Limpet beats Pond any day! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058230/
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
It sounds like they're in a seperate tank that is being filled with water from the reservoir prior to purification, since the chlorine and other chemicals used to purify the water would kill the fish pretty quickly. so, 1) It doesn't sound like they're physically in the water source and 2) Even if they were, there's naturally going to be fish in a reservoir anyway, and any of their feces are going to be taken care of during the purification process. So, don't worry about fish poop in your ice water.
"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
-George W. Bush, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
Give credit where credit's due.
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Hmm, i wonder if this is why the sea is so salty...
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
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
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.
The problem with a spectrometer is that the more you have in the substance you're testing, the harder it is to detect a single substance. It's not like every chemical has a single line that shows up on a spectrometer scan... actually, everything has several lines that show up. The more complex a substance is (and the heavier the atoms that make it up), the more lines appear. Pure Iron (Fe), for example, has 43 lines that show up on its spectrum. And drinking water isn't pure H2O. Not by a long shot... pure H2O tastes soapy, bland. Like there's something wrong with it. Our tap water has lots of stuff in it already that isn't harmful. Mineral content, and additives like chlorine and fluoride.
Now... they could establish a baseline and subtract that, but there's so much stuff already in drinking water that you'd probably have a hard time telling one thing from the next. What you think could be cyanide may actually be a higher than normal silica content. There's really no way to be sure that what you're seeing on a spectrometer is dangerous without doing a proper series of tests on it, and there's no way to do those tests fast enough to cut off the water supply. The result is that you would need to set the sensitivity *way* too high and end up getting a lot of false positives... when you're dealing with contaminated water supply, a false positive is far more desirable than a false negative.
But here's a system that costs a *lot* less to implement, and because you're using living beings that are much more sensitive to poisons than humans are, you'll see the effect of a toxin long before the concentration is high enough to seriously harm a human.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Does this mean we can carry water bottles on planes again -- if they have bluefish swimming in them?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
"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.