The U.S. Navy’s Remarkable Marine Mammal Program

On March 21, 2003, in one of the first combat operations of the U.S.-led invasion or Iraq, a combined force of American, British, and Polish troops attacked and captured the Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr. Throughout the invasion and the subsequent occupation, Umm Qasr would serve as a vital shipping terminal for humanitarian aid. But before any supplies could be landed, the port had to be cleared of mines and other explosives left behind by Iraqi forces. This proved a daunting task, with the thick mud at the harbour bottom reducing Explosive Ordnance Disposal or EOD teams to grope about in near-zero visibility. In response, the U.S. Navy dispatched its most elite diving team to Iraq. Trained for years by the Navy’s foremost experts, these divers could plunge more than 300 metres beneath the waves, hold their breath for up to 15 minutes, and do so all day long without suffering from the bends. Using their highly attuned senses, they could easily locate foreign objects in even the murkiest of waters, allowing them to clear over 100 mines and booby traps from Umm Qasr within weeks. And what’s more, they performed this heroic duty for no greater reward than a snack of fish. As you might have guessed, these superhuman sailors – named Makai and Tacoma – were not, in fact, human, but bottlenose dolphins. For over 60 years, the U.S. Navy has used trained dolphins and sea lions to carry out a variety of specialized missions, from espionage and mine clearance to defending naval bases from enemy divers, using their superior endurance and senses to perform tasks human divers cannot. But while the program has been highly successful, with the animals proving superior to even the most sophisticated drone technology, it has also attracted considerable controversy, with animal welfare activists accusing the Navy of abuse and questioning the ethics of using animals in warfare in the first place. This is fascinating story of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program.

The remarkable intelligence of marine mammals has long been known, with nautical lore abounding with tales of shipwrecked sailors being rescued by dolphins, porpoises, and other creatures. However, it would not be until the mid-20th century that anyone attempted to exploit these abilities for use in warfare. Among the first was Swedish behavioural scientist Valdemar Fellenius, who in 1941 established a facility at Gålö near Stockholm to train a group of harbour seals to locate and mark mines, submarines, torpedoes, and other naval ordnance. While Fellenius’s efforts were successful, the Swedish Navy was less than impressed, and in 1943 the project was shut down without the seals ever having been used in the field.

In 1959, the U.S. Navy launched its own dolphin research program in an attempt to develop new hydrodynamic shapes and coatings for torpedoes. In the course of this research, Navy scientists noted the dolphins’ exceptional intelligence and trainability and wondered if these could be exploited to perform specialized underwater missions. Thus, in 1962, a special research program was established at Point Mugu near Oxnard, California. Over the next decade, the program carried out experiments with various small marine mammals including bottlenose dolphins, beluga whales, porpoises, pilot whales, orcas, seals, and California sea lions – as well as non-mammal species such as sharks and rays – before finally settling on dolphins and sea lions as the ideal candidates. Not only can dolphins dive down to depths of 300 metres, but their exceptional natural sonar abilities allow them to easily locate objects buried in the seafloor even in pitch darkness. Sea lions can only dive down to 200 metres, but compensate for this with exceptional eyesight, speed, and agility.

The first Navy-trained marine mammal to be deployed in the field was a bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy, who in 1965 participated in the SEALAB II project, an effort to determine whether humans could live and work under the sea for extended periods. Over the course of the project, Tuffy was trained to ferry messages and supplies between the surface and the pressurized Sealab habitat, 62 metres below the Pacific Ocean off La Jolla, California. Tuffy was also trained to find and guide lost or injured divers back to the habitat. That same year, the Navy deployed 5 dolphins to Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam to carry out underwater surveillance of North Vietnamese naval bases and defend U.S. vessels from attack by enemy divers. This unit would remain in Vietnam until the end of the war in 1975.

Based on these early successes, in 1967 the Navy Marine Mammal Program was officially classified and moved to a new facility at Point Loma near San Diego. A second facility was also established in Hawaii at the Marine Corps Air Station at Kāneʻohe Bay. By the 1980s, the NMMP had a budget of $8 million dollars and had trained over 100 dolphins, sea lions, and beluga whales – which can dive deeper and operate in colder waters than most other marine mammals. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Navy dolphins were deployed to the Persian Gulf to defend Bahraini ports, American warships, and Kuwaiti oil tankers against Iraqi forces, playing a small but key role in the success of Operation Desert Storm. With the end of the Cold War, however, the strategic importance of the Marine Mammal Program declined, and the unit was downsized and eventually declassified. Yet the Navy’s cetacean sailors continued to serve both at home and abroad; during the 1996 Republican Convention in San Diego, for instance, dolphins patrolled the harbour against infiltration by foreign agents or protestors.

Today, the Marine Mammal Program has a budget of $40 million and employs 77 dolphins and 47 sea lions – as well as 54 civilians, six Army veterinary surgeons, 220 contractors, and 22 graduate students. The program’s animals, which in Navy jargon are referred to as Advanced Biological Weapon Systems or ABWS, are divided into five teams, designated Mk.[“Mark”] 4, Mk.5, Mk.6, Mk.7, and Mk.8. Each of these teams specializes in a different mission. For example, Mk.4 and Mk.7 use dolphins to locate and mark underwater mines, with the Mk.4 dolphins specializing in floating tethered mines and the Mk.7 dolphins in seafloor mines. The dolphins are trained to search an area using their natural sonar then return to their handler, using a variety of body movements to communicate the type of object found. They are then given a special marker buoy, which they use to locate the object for inspection and disposal by Navy EOD teams. Mk.8 dolphins also specialize in locating mines, however, they are not trained to mark them, Rather, they are used to find corridors through minefields and other defences and guide landing craft and other vessels ashore during amphibious assaults.

The Mk.6 team is trained for force protection, using dolphins and sea lions as sentries to defend naval bases against infiltration by enemy combat swimmers. For this task, dolphins are provided with a special device which they are trained to attach to the air tanks of any diver they encounter. The device then deploys a marker buoy fitted with a small explosive charge, which alerts defending forces to the swimmer’s presence. Sea lions carry a similar device that attaches to a swimmer’s limbs using a handcuff mechanism. Over the years, rumours have circulated that NMMP animals have been trained to use special weapons like poison dart guns to neutralize enemy swimmers – and cue the jokes about “frickin’ sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their frickin’ heads”… Indeed, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, sensational headlines announced that flooding had released a number of armed dolphins from a Navy facility in Louisiana into the surrounding waters…in spite of the fact that no such facility exists. But while foreign marine mammal programs may employ such tactics, the U.S. Navy has vehemently denied that it has trained any of its marine mammals for attack, citing the simple fact that they would be unable to distinguish between friendly and enemy divers. Dolphins are also extremely empathetic and able to detect a dying diver’s distress, meaning that even if a dolphin could be enticed to kill, it would be unlikely to do it again. Nonetheless, the mere presence of trained dolphin sentries is often enough to deter even the hardiest of divers. As Kaj Larsen, a former Navy SEAL explains:

“The truth is, it’s really one of the most effective ways to prevent attacks by combat divers, because everything else doesn’t really work. We really have no way to defeat a dolphin. You’re in their element, and they find you every single time underwater…It’s scary when you’re in the dark, cold water and you know that there is a huge dolphin somewhere out there. It’s definitely a gut-check.”

Finally, the last NMMP team, Mk. 5, is trained to find and recover test equipment such as experimental torpedoes and missiles from the ocean floor. The animals do this either using marker buoys like the Mk. 4 and 7 dolphins, or using a special “grabber claw” mounted on a harness or mouthpiece that latches onto the object to be recovered. Once attached, the claw deploys either a recovery line or flotation bag to allow the object to be returned to the surface.

All five NMMP teams can be deployed anywhere in the world with 72 hours’ notice, the animals being transported on special hammocks suspended in water-filled pens which can be carried aboard ships, cargo aircraft, and even helicopters. While on duty, the animals are fitted with an Anti Foraging Device or AFD, a muzzle or strip of velcro that prevents them from opening their mouths and eating. According to the Navy, this is to prevent the dolphins from ingesting harmful objects. Another tool used by NMMP teams is a “recall pinger”, an ultrasonic noisemaker that dolphins are trained to home in on. This is typically used to find and recover lost animals who fail to return to base after a mission.

While the NMMP is the oldest and best-known Navy mammal program in the world, it is not the only one. Currently, three other nations are known or suspected to have similar programs: Russia, Israel, and North Korea. The Russian program, which began in the 1970s, is the largest and most diverse in the world, and is divided into two main projects: one based near Murmansk in the Arctic Ocean employing seals and beluga whales, and other based in Sevastopol on the Black Sea using dolphins. The Black Sea team is believed to have been deployed to defend the port of Tartus during the Syrian Civil War, while on April 23, 2019, a Russian-trained beluga whale appeared off the coast of Norway. Dubbed “Hvaldimir” by the locals, it wore a special harness thought to be for a camera or other sensors, indicating that Russian Navy belugas are mainly used for surveillance.

According to Dough Cartilage of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, who once visited the “Dolphin Division” base in Sevastopol, Russian Navy dolphins are trained to deploy from aircraft using specially-designed parachutes or even from helicopters hovering at 50 metres. Cartlidge was also shown a nasty little device designed to be attached to enemy combat swimmers and inject their bodies with carbon dioxide: “As the commander there said to me: “That would bring him to the surface.” It would, of course. But it would be with his guts spewing out both ends.”

Lovely…

Russian dolphins have also reportedly been armed with knives to attack enemy swimmers, but for the psychological reasons previously explained, this is unlikely to be effective. The CO2 injector, on the other hand, can be remotely activated long after the dolphin has attached it, getting around this problem. Israeli and North Korean navy dolphins have allegedly also been trained for attack missions, but relatively little is known about these programs.

While the NMMP has proven remarkably effective, from the very beginning it and similar programs have come under fire from animal welfare activists, who argue not only that the Navy’s treatment of its dolphins and sea lions is cruel, but the very practice of using animals in warfare is unethical. Much of this criticism is leveled at the small pens the animals are housed in when off-duty and the even smaller containers in which they are transported to deployment zones. This, activists argue, as well as transporting the animals to unfamiliar environments halfway across the world, induces extreme levels of stress that can severely impact the animals’ health and quality of life. Indeed, when in the 1980s the Navy considered using dolphins to guard the Trident missile submarine base at Bangor, Washington, they were sued by activists arguing that moving the dolphins from California to the colder waters of Washington would harm the animals. A judge ruled that a study had to be completed before the move could be carried out, but the Navy ultimately abandoned the project.

The use of Anti-Foraging Devices has also proven controversial. While the Navy maintains that these are meant to prevent animals from ingesting harmful objects, animal trainers argue that their real purpose is to maintain the handlers’ control over the animals, since their training is based entirely on positive reinforcement using food. As Ric O’Barry, a former animal trainer who worked on the 1960s television series Flipper explains:

“When [dolphins] are full, they do not respond. This is exactly why we had five dolphins for the “Flipper” TV series. When Flipper #1 had ten pounds of food and was full, I lost control, and I would bring out Flipper #2, and so on.”

In response, the Navy has pointed out that its practices are in full compliance with the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Animal Welfare Acts, that the NMMP is fully accredited by the Association for the Accreditation of Animal Laboratory Animal Care or AAALAC, and us a member of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums. However, while the AAALAC sets minimum standards for animal care, it does not restrict the uses to which said animals are put – and it is here that many activists argue the real problem lies. Regardless of how well they are treated while off-duty, while deployed, NMMP animals are exposed to high levels of danger, largely in the form of unexploded ordnance. Also, as it is often difficult to tell a trained navy animal from its wild cousins, the use of marine mammals in a military capacity may encourage enemy nations to kill all such animals around naval bases and other strategic sites as a security precaution.

More fundamentally, activists argue that since animals have no knowledge of human conflicts and cannot consciously volunteer, ethically they should not be pressed into military service. Of course, the Navy has pointed out that animals like horses and pigeons have long been used in warfare, and that armed forces around the world make extensive use of dogs as sentries, for rescue, and for sniffing out hidden explosives. But according to Andrew Fenton, a professor of ethics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, the comparison between dolphins and sniffer dogs is not an accurate one.

“We shaped these animals to live in close quarters with humans and we artificially selected dogs to be part of our social world, and so, we can be part of their social world. Maybe given enough time, we could create a cetacean breed that fits that criteria, yet that’s difficult to predict. But the more pressing question is, should humans domesticate dolphins? If we did, we would have to severely narrow their world…And this, in bioethics, we call harm.”

Yet another major controversy concerns the manner in which naval animals are retired at the end of their service lives. During the downsizing of the early 1990s, the NMMP reduced its ranks from 103 dolphins down to 70. In response, in the 1992 Defence Appropriations Act, Congress allotted the NMMP half a million dollars to:

“…develop training procedures which will allow mammals which are no longer required for this project to be released into their natural habitat.”

However, after holding two conferences on the matter, the Navy concluded that such a reintroduction program would not be cost-effective. The Navy next tried offering the retirees to marine parks, but said parks had already implemented a successful breeding program, and there were only four takers. The NMMP was thus left with no choice but to take care of the dolphins for the rest of their lives. In 1994, the Navy arranged to send three dolphins to Sugarloaf sanctuary in Key West, run by the aforementioned Ric O’Barry. O’Barry planned to reeducate the dolphins and release them once the appropriate federal permits were obtained, but ultimately chose to release them prematurely, arguing that the federal permits were merely a ploy to prevent the release of Navy assets, and that waiting any longer would jeopardize the dolphins’ chances of adapting the wild. Alas, Luther and Buck were recaptured within two weeks and returned to the Navy, where they remain to this day.

In response to such mounting criticisms and logistical difficulties, the Navy has tried to phase out its Marine Mammal Program in favour of autonomous drones and other high-tech equipment. But, there’s a problem: none of this gear can hold a candle to the extraordinary abilities of dolphins and sea lions. As Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the Rand Corporation explains:

“[Marine mammals] offer so much at a relatively low cost that it seems absurd not to continue to use them, certainly in the near-term…We’re always five years away from supposedly having technology that will obviate the need from having to use the mammals. I question whether we’re at that point yet.

They have great precision in being able to differentiate objects that are similar to mines or mines themselves from the massive detritus that is on the sea floor in populated areas…Just as we use dogs to find drugs or explosives, there’s a lot of benefit for relying on the natural ability of dolphins. We don’t need to reinvent something we have a capability [for] already.”

Even Ric O’Barry, who has opposed NMMP for decades, agrees, stating:

“[Dolphins’] sonar makes our Navy’s best sonar system look like a toy.”

And so, the fine finned friends of the NMMP will continue to serve their country until technology finally catches up with their natural abilities – or until they inevitably depart our planet with a hearty salute of “so long, and thanks for all the fish.”

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