Dolphins
The Dolphin sculptures at the National Service Animals Memorial represents the Bottlenose Dolphins used by the Navy to find and retrieve equipment lost at sea and to identify intruders swimming into restricted areas.
Dolphins are also used to detect underwater mines, either floating from an anchor, or buried in the seafloor. Their echolocation abilities allow them to locate and identify objects and perform better than human divers.
Bottlenose dolphins are extremely adept at detecting mines, better and faster than any machine. Mechanical systems can be overwhelmed by the noise of ship traffic, crashing surf, and competing signals, but not these mammals.
Their sonar is finely tuned; they let out a series of sounds that bounce off of objects in water and then pick up the return echoes which form an acoustic picture of their environment.
A U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program dolphin named KDog, wearing a locating pinger, performed mine clearance work in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War.
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