Turns out dolphins make for far more than good children's movie protagonists.
Brien Aho/U.S. Navy/Getty ImagesHefi, a bottlenose dolphin, receives a routine medical evaluation on the well deck aboard USS Gunston Hall.
The Cold War took paranoia and human ingenuity to new heights — so much so that at the conflict’s 1960s peak the U.S. Navy looked to dolphins to beat the Soviets.
Indeed, over the course of the Cold War the Navy captured live dolphins to train for military purposes, and they’re still around today. In fact, as you read this, dolphins are currently patrolling the waters outside a Seattle-area submarine base, which is home to a huge stockpile of nuclear warheads.
The United States isn’t alone in its military dolphin possession, however. Russia has them as well, possibly along with Iran and Israel (if you believe Hamas). Still, the U.S. Navy is the world’s only military force that has been open about training dolphins.
But just what is the U.S. Navy doing with these creatures?
U.S. Navy Dolphins
The Navy first discovered dolphins’ bomb-seeking utility when researchers studied Notty, a female Pacific white-sided dolphin and the first dolphin in the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, in 1960.
Initially, the Navy intended to study dolphins’ bodies and swimming styles in order to develop a faster torpedo with less drag, but it soon changed its focus to training covert dolphins in mine detection.
“It was soon after discovered that [dolphins] had excellent biological sonar, so they definitely did a lot of research on that as well,” Ed Budzyna, a spokesman for SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific, told Business Insider. “The reason [dolphins are] used is that they have abilities that are unmatched still by anything man-made.”
Using their forehead melons, dolphins can listen to how emitted sounds bounce back, which allows them to analyze their surroundings instantly.
According to a Navy Marine Mammal Program spokesperson who discussed the matter with National Geographic, dolphins don’t just know that they’re swimming toward a piece of metal, they even know what sort of metal they’re swimming toward, making them especially talented at finding underwater mines.
In practice, it works like this: When the dolphins find a mine, they quickly return to their trainers, who give the dolphins a flag attached to a rope to put next to the mine.
If the dolphins are on guard duty, they will approach enemy divers from behind and clamp a device onto their air tank. This device connects to a floating buoy that explodes above water, alerting the dolphin’s handlers to both the intruder’s presence and location.
The Navy has made great use of their trained dolphins across time. For example, five dolphins guarded an Army ammunition pier in Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay for two full years in the 1970s.
The following decade, the Navy deployed the animals to protect the Third Fleet flagship anchored in Manama Harbor during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1996, the Navy enlisted the dolphins to thwart a bomb scare during the Republican Presidential Convention in San Diego. In 2003, dolphins returned to Iraq in order to clear mines in the path of Navy vessels supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
To this day, the U.S. Navy loves its sea mammals, whether they be dolphins, sea lions, or belugas. In fact, the Navy Marine Mammal Program at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California currently has 50 sea lions and 85 dolphins, according to Business Insider, who spoke to SPAWAR in 2015.
K-Dog, a bottlenose dolphin, rests in a Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat. Photo by Brien Aho/U.S. Navy/Getty Images
The Navy has put its money where its mouth is, too. In 2002, NBC reported that the Navy Marine Mammal Program received $14 million in funding a year, and had the Pentagon’s backing through 2020.
However, more recent reports confirm that militarized dolphins are being phased out starting 2017 in favor of underwater drones, which don’t require constant upkeep and costly care.
Don’t tell that to the Russians, though. They just bought five military dolphins.
Russian Navy
Earlier this year, the Russian Ministry of Defense put out a call for five bottlenose dolphins. They sought three male and two female dolphins between the ages of three and five with faultless teeth and impeccable motor skills. According to Fortune, Moscow’s Utrish Dolphinarium sold the Russian government five dolphins for $26,000.
This marks the first time that the Russian government has publicly expressed any interest in military dolphins since the fall of the Soviet Union, when it lost its militarized sea mammal facility in Crimea to Ukraine. After the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the facility would fall back into the Kremlin’s hands.
Unfortunately for Russia, Ukraine didn’t want to keep paying for these military dolphins. In 2000, the BBC writes that Ukraine offloaded them as well as their trainer, Boris Zhurid, to Iran. Nobody outside Iran knows what happened to the Soviet-trained dolphins since then.
Killer Dolphins
K-Dog, a bottlenose dolphin, leaps out of the water while training near the USS Gunston Hall. Photo by Brien Aho/U.S. Navy/Getty Images
According to the BBC, these Soviet sea mammals did not just know how to identify bombs; in fact, Zhurid trained them to kill. Soviet handlers trained dolphins to attack enemy divers with harpoons strapped to their backs, or with hypodermic syringes loaded with carbon dioxide. Alternatively, trainers taught these dolphins how to drag enemies to the surface for capture. They also served as unwitting kamikaze pilots: Trainers would affix bombs to the dolphins, such that when the neared a ship’s hull, the bomb (and the dolphin) would explode.
Allegedly, Soviet dolphins could even distinguish between foreign and Soviet submarines by the propeller noise. The U.S. Navy says that’s impossible, and cites these sort of logistical problems as one of the reasons why they never trained dolphins to kill.
At least, officially. Despite the U.S. Navy’s consistent, fervent denials that handlers have ever trained American military dolphins to kill, The New York Times reported in 1990 that — despite a Navy spokesman specifically denying the charge — former Navy trainers told them that dolphins were being taught “to kill enemy divers with nose-mounted guns and explosives.”
In a report dated a year before, Richard O’Barry, a former Navy officer turned activist and critic of the Navy program, told The New York Times that the CIA had approached him and asked if he would teach dolphins how to plant explosives on ships. O’Barry says he turned them down.
Whether the U.S. trained killer dolphins or not, Navy SEALs still had to learn how to fight the threat of weaponized Soviet dolphins. Former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb describes one such training exercise in his memoir, writing that trainers used the dolphins:
“To track down enemy divers, outfitting them with a device strapped onto the head that contains a [simulated] compressed gas needle . . . Once the dolphin has tracked you down, it butts you; the needle shoots out and pokes you, creating an embolism [lethal air or gas bubble] . . . Within moments, you’re dead.”
On his blog, Webb would later post a message he received from anonymous former Navy dolphin trainer. This missive would state that yes, the Navy did indeed train these mammals to kill. “The dolphins would have their simulated CO2 system attached to their nose, they would then ram us in the chest cavity to simulate the injection,” the note says. “The dolphins could kill just with this force alone (we had to dive with special padding) but the idea was to recover the bodies and any intelligence.”
Brien Aho/U.S. Navy/Getty ImagesA mammal handler brushes the teeth of a bottlenose dolphin aboard the USS Gunston Hall.
As ugly as this business was, the history of weaponized dolphins contains at least one bright spot: The former Soviet dolphins had a few nice years before Ukraine sold them to Iran in 2000. With the Cold War over, nothing better to do, and no one to murder underwater, the killer dolphins provided swimming therapy for disabled children.
After learning about military dolphins, discover all the violent ways in which humans have used animals as weapons, learn about these weird pets, before learning how dolphins have conversations like humans do. Then, see some of the deadliest animals that most people don’t know about.
