DARPA Funds Remote Control Sharks

An anonymous reader writes "From Undersea Spies: Turning Sharks into Robotic Sentries "It seems like science fiction, but the U.S. military would like to use sharks as underwater spies. The folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who dream up the future of weapons and military systems, envision squads of sharks prowling the oceans with sensors that could transmit evidence of explosives or other threats.""

Comments

Now all that's missing

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

are the friggin' laser beams and head mounts...

I didn't know...

[denttford]

...that DARPA has a division researching /. trolling.

Re:Please update me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a line from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil says that what he wanted was sharks with lasers on their heads and the other guy has to explain that sharks are endangered and so they settled for the next best thing -- sea bass.

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
Number Two: Sea Bass.
Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.
Number Two: They're mutated sea bass.
Dr. Evil: Are they ill tempered?
Number Two: Absolutely.
Dr. Evil: Oh well, that's a start.

DARPA or DHARMA?

[SirBruce]

Do the sharks have logos on them?

Bruce

Re:it used to be dolphins

[Hal_Porter]

Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.

They're not training them, they're remote controlling them

http://www.bu.edu/alumni/buforward/archives/Dec_20 06/articles/spies.html

DARPA turned to Jelle Atema, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of biology at the Boston University Marine Program, who for many years has been researching how marine animals use their sense of smell. Atema proposed that because sharks are expert at tracking odors over very long distances, the key to steering a shark was to follow its nose. With more than a year of DARPA funding, which ended last year, Atema was able to use electrical stimulation of a sharks brain, mimicking odor, to guide the shark around a large tank.

So the simplicity of the shark's brain is actually an advantage. From the shark's point of view, it's chasing the smell, presumably, of prey.

Interestingly, something like this happens naturally. Parasitic wasps perform brain surgery to zombify roaches.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/03/wasp_performs _roachb.html

Makes you wonder if you could do it with higher animals actually. Even though we seem to have aa certain amount of free will about how we achieve our objectives of eating and reproducing and avoiding pain, there's probably low level hardware in our the oldest parts of our brains which enforces those objectives by sending reward/punishment signals 'up' to the high level, conscious bits of our brains. I can imagine that if you attached electrodes in the right places, you could run mammals and even humans in remote controlled zombie mode too. It would be a hellish experience though, since you'd know your free will had been strongly curtailed.

Still, look on the bright side, most /.'s seem to be quite skilled at ignoring the signals from their cerebellum to reproduce. So long as the evil scientists don't wire the neurons that reward you for successfully finding carbohydrate based junk food we should be immune.