Military marine mammals: navy dolphins and belugas

Since the 1960s, navies have been training dolphins, sea lions and belugas to detect mines, recover equipment or spot divers. The American programme at San Diego, long secret and later declassified, is now well documented; its Soviet counterpart at Sevastopol competed with it during the Cold War.

The widget above sorts established facts from legends: the famous beluga “Hvaldimir”, which appeared in Norway wearing a harness in 2019, or the persistent myth of the “killer dolphins” that the US Navy has always denied.

Why dolphins rather than machines?

The biosonar of the common bottlenose dolphin is still, to this day, better than artificial sonars at locating small objects buried in the cluttered, turbid bottoms of harbours. Its diving ability, its speed and the fineness of its acoustic discrimination make it a mine detector that is hard to match. Sea lions, for their part, excel at recovering equipment thanks to their low-light vision.

These programmes fuel a lively ethical debate on the use of wild animals for military purposes. The navies concerned stress that their animals are confined to detecting and marking, with no offensive lethal role.

Further reading: explore the cognitive tests that reveal their intelligence, the debate on captivity and the gallery of famous cetaceans, Hvaldimir among them.