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Dolphin-Whale Navy Training: A Technical Film Report on Project Deep Ops 1970 US Navy
🕑 Added 2020-09-09 20:10:50 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
'This film report on Project Deep Ops provides an overview of a program to train orca and pilot whales to assist the US Navy in the retrieval of underwater objects. A pilot whale named Morgan is shown working with human trainers to carry out retrieval tasks.'
Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
A military marine mammal is a cetacean or pinniped that has been trained for military uses. Examples include bottlenose dolphins, seals, sea lions and belugas...
Dolphins
Rumors of military dolphins include training them to lay underwater mines, to locate enemy combatants, or to seek and destroy submarines using kamikaze methods... The U.S. Navy denies ever having trained its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any way or to carry weapons to destroy ships.
Soviet Union Navy dolphins
The Soviet Navy operated a research facility 44.5800°N 33.4023°E to explore military uses of marine mammals at Kazachya Bukhta, near Sevastopol...
Russian Federation, Ukraine and Iran
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Soviet military dolphin program was passed to the Ukrainian Navy... After the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian dolphin program was taken over by Russia...
Government public records show that in 2016, five bottlenose dolphins were purchased by the Russian defence ministry from Moscow’s Utrish Dolphinarium.
United States Navy dolphins
The U.S. Navy trains dolphins and sea lions under the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, which is based in San Diego, California. They get some of their dolphins from the Gulf of Mexico. Military dolphins were used by the U.S. Navy during the First and Second Gulf Wars, and their use dates back to the Vietnam War. About 75 dolphins were in the program circa 2007, and around 70 dolphins and 30 sea lions were reported to be in the program in 2019.
The United States Navy implemented a program in 1960 to work with dolphins and sea lions in order to help with defense, mine detection, and the design of new submarines and new underwater weapons. The Navy did many tests with several marine mammals to determine which would be best for the jobs they needed done, with "more than 19 species...including some sharks and birds" tested, though the bottlenose dolphin and California sea lion were considered the best at what the Navy needed them for. The bottlenose dolphins' asset was their highly evolved biosonar, helping to find underwater mines, and the sea lions' asset was their impeccable underwater vision, which can help to detect enemy swimmers. In fiscal year 2007, the United States Navy spent $14 million on research on marine mammals as weapons and marine mammal training programs in object recovery and mine detection and have 75 trained dolphins. Dolphins have contributed to saving more lives in open water than specially trained life savers...
Training
The dolphins and sea lions are trained by five teams of the Navy's Marine Mammal fleet members. One team specializes in swimmer detection, three teams in mine location, and another team in object recoveries. The quick-response goal of this fleet is to mobilize a team and be on site within 72 hours. Dolphins are trained much as police dogs and hunting dogs are. They are given rewards such as fish on correct completion of a task. Dolphins are trained to detect underwater mines and enemy swimmers and then report back to their handlers. Rumours that dolphins had been trained to kill divers have been denied by the US Navy, which claims that training dolphins to fight or kill humans is impossible.
Retired US Admiral Tim Keating claimed that military dolphins could be used to detect mines in the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran threatened to close the waterway in January 2012...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Marine_Mammal_Program
The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP) is a program administered by the U.S. Navy which studies the military use of marine mammals - principally bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions - and trains animals to perform tasks such as ship and harbor protection, mine detection and clearance, and equipment recovery. The program is based in San Diego, California, where animals are housed and trained on an ongoing basis. NMMP animal teams have been deployed for use in combat zones, such as during the Vietnam War and the Iraq War...
