Sea lions U-boats

The Germans were torpedoing hundreds of tons of British merchant ships each month during World War I.

Could sea lions save the day? So thought a showman named Joseph Wood. Why couldn’t the Royal Navy teach sea lions to home in on noise from the U Boats and indicate where they were?

The British military gave the idea a try. Via Pavlov-style training, the British hoped that the sea lions could ignore fish sounds. Alas, however, the researchers could not replicate in real life the success of experiments in a swimming pool.

The sea lions show up in what the BBS describes as “a free online compendium” with “hundreds of stories from the home front, including archive films, audio clips, photographs and documents from the Imperial War Museums (IWM).”

I downloaded a noninteractive PDF e-book version and found just one reference to sea lions, with nary a mention of their U-boat hunting prowess or lack thereof. But presumably the animals are present in a meaningful way in an interactive e-book-style app available only in the U.K., in iPad, Kindle and Android  versions.

Ah, so the shoe is on the other foot! Imagine all the U.S. e-book goodness to which the Brits can’t enjoy access because of stupid territorial restrictions.

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