RUN, JOE, RUN:

Animal recruits: Mine-sweeping dolphins and bomb-sniffing bees are among the latest to be drafted into military service (Beth Daley, 4/1/2003, Boston Globe)

Weaponizing animals has been one of the military's most controversial efforts. Russian soldiers in World War II reportedly strapped bombs to dogs and taught them to crawl under enemy tanks -- although the effort failed because the dogs went after Russian tanks instead. Perhaps the most bizarre attempt by the US military in World War II was to equip bats with incendiary devices and fly them into Japanese cities.

In Vietnam, the Viet Cong used to bore holes in the tails of poisonous snakes and nail them to tunnel ceilings. ''It would hang there and bite you in the face,'' said Jim Knight, a herpetologist at the South Carolina State Museum who is also a Vietnam War veteran. Today, US soldiers in Iraq are warned not to venture too close to camels, lest they be booby-trapped with explosives.

Nature has long given the military technological ideas. In recent years, Air Force researchers have been racing to understand the amazing heat-seeking ability of pit vipers and beetles, so as to create machines to do the same thing. Pit vipers, which include snakes such as copperheads and cottonmouths, can sense a mouse several feet away in the dark. The beetles, meanwhile, have sensors on their chest that can tell them when a forest fire is burning as far as 30 miles away. The military already has heat-seeking devices to find missiles and other weapons, but the equipment is fragile, expensive and must often be cooled to frigid temperatures to work.

Still, since technology is so far behind nature, the military needs to harness the animal itself. Bees at Sandia National Laboratories are being trained to find explosives and transmit the findings back to humans. The bees may also one day be used to find land mines or to sniff out car bombs at border stops. Meanwhile, researchers at Iowa State have trained tiny parasitic wasps to detect similar odors. The military is now funding research into tiny transmitters that bees or wasps can carry.

Technological advances aside, sometimes animals just work well in war because they are able to scare the enemy so well. Hannibal's elephants demonstrated a crushing strength. And the snakes in Vietnam were the stuff of nightmares for many soldiers.

''You can even do this with non-dangerous animals: To most people, a snake is a snake; just ask Indiana Jones,'' said Knight, the herpetologist. He said such intimidation works well, but much of it is considered inhumane and against the Geneva Convention's rules of war. ''The funny thing is, you can kill people in war, but you can't mess with their minds.''

You'd think the smell would suffice to keep them away from the camels. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2003 7:58 AM