Navy anti-terror exercise includes mine-hunting dolphins

VIRGINIA BEACH

They may be the most elite group in the Navy.

Their ranks are tiny: just 80 of them in all. They spend most of their lives at sea. And they train for their classified missions seven days a week, three to six years at a stretch.

They are tursiops truncatus - bottlenose dolphins - and their skills are very much in demand this week in Hampton Roads.

Four mine-hunting Navy dolphins have been working in local waters and living near a pier at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek as part of a weeklong military exercise called Frontier Sentinel, which wraps up Friday.

Most participants are human, in the form of 2,500 U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Canadian Navy personnel. They're responding to a troubling scenario: a terrorist group gets access to a merchant ship that sails into Hampton Roads and places mines in the shipping channel.

To find and neutralize the dummy mines, the two navies are using all the technology at their disposal: sonar arrays towed behind Canadian coastal defense vessels and U.S. MH-53 Sea Dragon helicopters; unmanned underwater vehicles with side-scanning sonar and cameras; dolphins; and Canadian and U.S. Navy divers.

It's the first time that dolphins have deployed to Hampton Roads, according to Navy public affairs officers. But the dolphins are used to traveling. The Navy's marine mammals - dolphins and sea lions - have worked in dozens of locales, including the Persian Gulf; the Mediterranean and North Seas; and in the waters off Newfoundland, Canada, and Guam.

Tom LaPuzza, a spokesman for the Navy's Space and Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, which runs the marine mammal program, said dolphins are particularly good at finding objects in "high clutter, shallow water" areas where sonar and unmanned underwater vehicles don't work as well.

Working from small boats with a handler - usually a Navy diver - the trained dolphins are first instructed to find any mine-like objects resting on the sea floor or tethered in the water.

They know to look for a couple of specific things: man-made, metal objects that are a few feet long, things with wires or explosives. If there's a television set or a washing machine in the water, a trained dolphin will indicate that as a possible mine, he said.

Using echo-location, bottlenose dolphins can detect those types of objects from about 150 yards away. After a dolphin has been commanded to look for an object, it will scan the area and swim back to the boat. If it believes it's found something, it touches a tennis ball or plastic disk at the front of the boat.

Then the handler will give the dolphin a marking device and signal it to drop the marker a certain distance away from the suspected mine. A Navy diver will take to the water for a detailed inspection and decide whether to disarm or detonate the mine.

On Wednesday, Petty Officer 2nd Class Andre s Palacio used hand commands to run Puts the dolphin through a series of basic tasks: Open her mouth. Clear water from atop the blowhole on top of her head. Hold the top half of her body out of the water and shake her pectoral flippers. Blow bubbles. Roll over.

In between every task he gave her a snack as her reward: capelin, a small fish. Dolphins also love to be touched, and the fish are often accompanied by a scratch on the belly.

"They're like human beings. They have moods," Palacio said. "You feel their body language and you know when they're motivated, when they're happy, when they're sad."

He said Puts can sense his mood, too. One time during training, Palacio said, he cut his hand on the boat and was holding it close to his body. The dolphin swam up to him and rested its rostrum, or nose, in his lap, as if to comfort him.

Puts and her three fellow minehunting dolphins will fly back to California in a few days. Each one floats in a fleece-lined sling inside a small pool.

Like Navy SEAL commandos, Navy dolphins can head to a hot spot quickly, LaPuzza said.

The mammals can deploy with 72 hours' notice.