Fishy Fishy

Apparently, cities are now using fish to combat terrorism in their water supply:

Bluegills — a hardy species about the size of a human hand — are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to chemical disturbances in their environment, and when exposed to toxins, they experience the fish version of coughing, flexing their gills to expel unwanted particles.

The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the bluegills' vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong.

You know, that’s pretty cool and everything, but email??  Come on, fish.  How about a buzzer or something?  Or a flashing red light?  With our luck, we’ll get a stupid fish who types “defer salmonella” in the subject line and it’ll get sucked into the junk email folder and lost forever.  I actually did get such an email in my junk folder today, but it was merely a stock tip for something worth $0.175 which is estimated to reach $0.75 within the week.  I can’t wait.

But lest you think we’ve finally foiled Bin Laden for good, these fish apparently do have their limitations:
And they are no use against other sorts of attacks — say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water.

Damn!  Damn!  Damn!  Don’t these fish know how important this is?  I know, it’s impressive enough that the fish can detect these threats, and the email thing is pretty cool.  (I wonder how they type)  But until these fishes get up off their asses and start defending our waters against bombs and hackers, we’re stuck relying on Bush.  And with what we’ve seen so far…I’d rather go with the fish.