Co-op Spotlight: Navy SEAL(ion)s
By Megan Pinaire, Psychology, 2018
This summer, I did a four-month co-op with the Navy marine mammal program. I worked at the Navy base in Point Loma, California. Just across the bay from scenic Coronado island are the ocean water pens where I worked with some of the most intelligent animals that inhabit our oceans: dolphins and sea lions.
Most of the time, when I tell people I worked with the Navy sea lions and dolphins, they respond with something along the lines of, “those are the animals the Navy sends to disable mines right?” or the even more shocking, “those are the animals they Navy sends to plant mines right?”
Needless to say, this is not what Navy dolphins and sea lions are used for. In fact, one commonly used system is a sea lion system called MK 5 object recovery. This is the Navy system that is completely declassified. These sea lions are trained to dive to depths up to and exceeding 800 feet to find and mark debris from Navy machinery tests that occur over the ocean. Debris falls into the ocean, and the MK 5 sea lions mark it so that it can be retrieved.
The process is completely harmless to the sea lions. In fact, they seem to enjoy the work they do. First, the trainer will send the sea lion into the water to search for the target, and when the sea lion finds the target, it will return and signal a positive by touching a paddle on the side of the boat with its nose. The trainer will proceed to hold out a contraption called a bite plate. This bite plate is a neoprene-covered device that the sea lion holds in its mouth. The sea lion will swim down, using its exquisite low-light vision to re-find the target, and forcefully attach the bite plate to the target. The sea lion will tug back on the bite plate to ensure that it is secured on the target before swimming back to the boat for a fish reward. After the target is marked, trainers and Navy personnel can pull the target up onto the boat, and the mission is accomplished.
A normal day for me on co-op began at 6:00 a.m. on the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command base (SPAWAR) where I would prepare the diets of each animal on the crew I was on for that rotation. My crew for the first half of the summer was made up of the breeding dolphins, including pregnant females and new moms and calves. My crew for the second half of the summer was made up of sea lion pups. These are the young sea lions who are learning their manners, how to go into open water, and the beginnings of how their future systems will work. After diet preparation, I would drive to the Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command Complex (NMAWC), where the dolphin and sea lion pens were located. For the next five hours or so, I would interact with the trainers and animals on the crew I was assigned to. I would always get to watch training sessions, and I often participated and interacted with the animals myself. I was on the water all day, since the pens were floating ocean pens. Often, when I worked with sea lions, I was on a boat in the bay for much of this time as well.
While as an intern I was someone who did much of the grunt work around the Navy bases, I gained so much actual training knowledge and experience. The opportunity to actually participate in and, at times, run a training session was invaluable and inspiring. Moreover, I developed personal relationships with the trainers I worked with, learned all of their stories and asked any questions I could possibly think of about the animals, the training, etc.
The way the Navy and other training facilities such as SeaWorld train their animals is through operant conditioning; specifically, positive reinforcement. Under this process, the animals are rewarded (reinforced) for performing a behavior correctly. However, if the behavior is not performed or is performed incorrectly, there is no punishment. Instead, there is simply no reinforcement. Through this, the animal learns what it gets reinforced for, and thus the reinforced behaviors become more frequent.
Of course, training a dolphin calf or a sea lion pup is not as simple as it sounds. Trainers need a lot of experience and teamwork to train a successful systems animal for the Navy. Between the trainer and the animal, there must be respect, understanding, and patience.
The trainers at the Navy Marine Mammal Program taught me all about operant conditioning in addition to the process of beginning the training of a dolphin calf or sea lion pup all the way through training for complex behaviors needed for the Navy work that they do.
Living in California for the whole summer also made this co-op that much cooler. I lived an easy fifteen-minute drive west to the beach, SeaWorld, Old Town San Diego, and a short drive east to great hiking mountains. I jumped off an ocean cliff with my fellow interns and watched the sunset on many occasions over the ocean from the view of these cliffs, appropriately named Sunset Cliffs.
I brought so much home with me from my co-op in San Diego. I left California with more knowledge about marine mammals and the process of training than I thought I could learn in one summer. I met one of my best friends during the internship, someone I never would have met had I not taken the chance on a co-op in a state I had never been to, let alone lived in for an extended period of time. All in all, it was an experience that I never imagined I would have before coming to Northeastern. The opportunity to create my own co-op made my first co-op experience one that I will never forget.
