Technology and life, working together effectively!
An excerpt.
Anti-terror fish guard S.F.'s water
Bluegill monitored to detect an attack on city's drinking supply
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
Fish are being drafted in San Francisco's war against possible terrorist threats to its water supply.
Akin to hospital gadgets that chart a patient's heart rate and breathing, a new water-quality monitoring system automatically analyzes the behavior of eight to 12 bluegill fish in a tank at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's water-treatment plant in Millbrae.
If the computers sense that the fish are upset by something in the water, "the system immediately triggers water samples to be taken, and the staff are alerted by pager and e-mail," said commission spokesman Tony Winnicker.
The monitoring system, which costs $110,000 per unit, was installed in April. Instruments inside the tank listen for phenomena such as fish coughs.
Like a human who coughs to expel unwanted matter from his respiratory system, fish cough by flexing their gills as a way of clearing unwelcome particles -- say, grains of sand -- from their breathing passages.
Inside the tank, the instruments are so sensitive that they can tell which fish coughed. The instruments transmit their findings to nearby computers, which compare the fish cough rates and other behaviors to their normal behaviors.
