Trained Seals To Hunt U-Boats?

Northern Advocate, 26 January 1940, Page 8

Trained Seals To Hunt U-Boats?

The Royal Navy is said to have a submarine detector so delicate that it will record the antics of a nearby whale.

But in 1917 it had no such device and the intensified U-boat campaign was giving the Admiralty a worrying time.

Then an American scientist, Dr. Robert William Wood, professor of physics at John Hopkins University, had an idea. He suggested that as the Allies could not find a satisfactory mechanical device they might as well try a mammalian one. Seals, he pointed out, could be trained to follow the oil trail, or the noise of the enemy submarine’s screws.

The Admiralty took up the suggestion seriously, and secret experiments were begun on a lake in North Wales. Chief assistants were two seals that had come all the way from California, and certain skilled trainers.

All animal training being on the reward principle, an electric buzzer was sounded under water and the seals learnt that if they swam to the noise, a fish dessert awaited them. The next step came with tests with a submarine in Portsmouth. The submarine cruised on the surface at first and sounding an electric buzzer. Later the seals would swim to the the submarine, guided only by the sound of the propellers—and the thought of the fish reward that was always there for them. Tests with a diving submarine ensued and invariably the seals followed, and jumped on deck the instant it_ came to the surface. The war ended before experiments could be carried further.

The trainers found that sometimes the seals followed other boats. Occasionally, too, at first, they played truant and went on fishing expeditions of their own, but when muzzles were introduced this difficulty was removed. Floats were attached to the seals and these, too, were a problem; if they were big enough to be seen at great distances they crippled the seals. One wonders if seals will find employment in hunting the “tin fish” of this present war? 1 Considering the instrumental competition it is doubtful.—“M.E.B.,” in the “Sydney Morning Herald.”