Russia lags US in training military sea mammals: Scientist

01 December 2009 - 13:22
By SAPA

Scientists are training seals to carry out secret military missions.

A Russian scientist who trains seals to carry out secret military missions complained in a newspaper interview Tuesday that Russia has fallen behind the United States in the race to arm sea mammals.

"We would really like our animals in future to work like American sea lions," Gennady Matishov, director of the Murmansk Marine Biology Institute in northern Russia, told the Izvestia daily.

“The Americans drop their animals from helicopters into enemy waters and then the animals place mines on installations, make videos of what they see along an enemy shore or use a special gauge to measure radiation," he added.

Matishov trains around 10 seals that can locate mines, pick up objects from the seabed and assist divers by bringing them tools, Izvestia reported.

What is more, the seals can differentiate a Russian diver from an enemy and can "render harmless" or even kill an enemy, the newspaper said.

Matishov said he was one of the few researchers still working in the field after the fall of the Soviet Union.

His research is financed by the Russian Academy of Sciences as a study into sea mammal behavior, but is also supported by the Russian Navy.

"Our successes have also been appreciated by the military," Matishov told Izvestia, though he said he could not reveal all the details of the military tasks assigned to seals.

In Soviet times, bottle-nosed dolphins were trained to guard the Sevastopol naval base on the Black Sea -- now in Ukraine -- and if necessary to kill enemy infiltrators using spears attached to special muzzles, Matishov said.

"If it found an intruder, the dolphin would immediately communicate to an operator on the shore and if it got the order, could kill him on its own," Matishov said.

Dolphins were also trained to find torpedoes and mines and were even dropped from helicopters, Matishov said, but the training centre at Sevastopol closed with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[Picture courtesy of: seawatchfoundation.org.uk]

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