Comrade Flipper reporting for duty!
Russia scored a military bonus when it took over the Crimean peninsula — a pod of killer dolphins that had been trained by the Ukrainian navy, Russian media reported.
The “combat dolphin program” in the Crimean city of Sevastopol will now come under control of the Russian navy, an employee at the facility where the dolphins are trained told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
The Ukrainian government was about to scuttle the fleet of marine mammals.
But the Russians have other ideas for the dolphins, which are trained to patrol open waters and attack enemy targets, attach buoys to mines and other items of military interest and detect frogmen in Russian waters.
“The oceanarium’s engineers are developing new instruments for new applications to boost the operational efficiency of the dolphins underwater,” the unidentified employee told RIA.
“Our experts have developed new devices, which convert the detection of objects by the dolphins’ underwater sonar to a signal on an operator’s monitor,” the source said. “But the Ukrainian navy lacked the funds for such know-how, and some projects had to be shuttered.”
After the Soviet Union fell apart, the dolphin program was turned over to the Ukrainian navy.
The facility is one of only two combat dolphin training centers in the world. The other is run by the US Navy in San Diego.