SILVERDALE, WASH. — Some of the nation's most sophisticated military submarines are based in the chilly waters of Puget Sound, an inlet of islands, peninsulas and harbors that is worryingly vulnerable to terrorist attack from a furtive diver or brazen suicide swimmer.
But the Navy's plan to use a squadron of highly trained dolphins and sea lions to patrol and protect the submarine fleet is running into opposition from those who fear the glacier-fed waters of the sound are too frigid for warm-water dolphins.
Dolphins provide security for the Navy's Kings Bay submarine base in southeast Georgia and have been deployed through the years in Vietnam, Bahrain and Iraq.
"Their strengths are that they are a mobile sensor: They have the best sensor we know about, and you can have them swim anywhere in the bay. They can outswim any man, they can localize the threat, and they can combine with the sea lions, which have good directional hearing," said Steve Hugueley, who leads the marine mammal project at Kings Bay.
The Navy's 78 dolphins, 27 sea lions and a beluga are trained to alert a patrol boat of human overseers when they detect a swimmer or diver in the security zone.
The animal is handed a floating marker to position on the surface above the suspect diver or swimmer.
Finally, the animal attaches a leg ring to the target that is connected by a line to the patrol boat, allowing security officers to reel the target in.
"It's like people-fishing," said Dorian Houser, civilian research scientist for the Navy's marine mammal program in San Diego.
But the dolphins, which are based in San Diego, are accustomed to water temperatures averaging 10 degrees higher than those in Puget Sound. There are no native bottlenose dolphins in Puget Sound; the Pacific bottlenose dolphin normally is not found farther north than Santa Cruz.
And the dolphins the Navy plans to deploy in Puget Sound aren't the Pacific dolphins native to California. They hail from the Atlantic, often captured in the warm waters of the Caribbean that may be 20 to 30 degrees warmer than those off Washington state, said Toni Frohoff, a dolphin biologist opposed to the dolphin deployment.
Average water temperatures at the Bangor submarine base, west of Seattle, range from 44.5 to 57.2 degrees. "It's just a matter of being humane, or civilized, in acknowledging there's a reason why bottlenose dolphins, especially the warm-water Atlantic variety, do not exist in the water here. It's just too darned cold. And they don't have the physiology to adapt," Frohoff said.
