Water quality monitoring by live fish

Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)
With MaaS, as with many physical facility security services, we design, own, install, and maintain the security equipment. Like a software as a service (SaaS) model, an annual subscription fee covers everything.

How MaaS Works

You subscribe. You respond to alerts. We do the rest.

Equipment
In 2018, after a 10-yr run with the 1st gen device, we released a 2nd gen device, the BG-2.

Monitoring
Eight live Bluegills continuously vote on your water quality with their every breath.

Alerting
A signal interpretation algorithm triggers alerts when the Bluegills detect a contaminant.

Software
A bio-monitoring app runs on a local PC and graphically displays the fish breathing pattern.

Installation
One-day install by experts trained on the BG-n and the US Army animal handling protocol.

Maintenance
Our technicians visit on a biweekly basis, maintaining the BG-n and switching fish.

Like other utilities, we use fancy online analytical devices. When we get an alarm from one of those devices, we first check our fish biomonitor. If the fish signal shows normal we go figure out why our other equipment malfunctioned again.

— Manager, Water Quality Lab, East Coast Public Water Utility

BG-n: The Patented Technology Behind MaaS

The BG-n product line comprises different physical configurations of online devices that continuously monitor for the presence of toxic chemicals in water streams. Present applications include installs on incoming and finished streams at water utilities as well as an effluent stream discharging into surface waters adjacent to Chesapeake Bay.

The technology specifically monitors Bluegills. The publicly available EPA Ecotox database lists thousands of studies detailing Bluegill response to various toxic chemicals. In experiments using a broad spectrum of contaminants (including arsenic, cyanide, several nerve agents, ammonia, mercuric chloride and seizure agents such as strychnine), the Army verified a highly reliable response by this technology with negligible false positives.

How Our Technology Works End-to-End

Like the best systems, the BG-n serves reliably because of the simplicity of the underlying design. Working with customers, we install the device in the proximity of a water stream requiring monitoring. We then pipe a flow of one liter per minute or more through the device, feeding data to a bio-monitor software program from both the fish monitoring chambers and a water quality sonde.

Inside the device, water circulates through eight discrete parallel chambers, each with a live swimming and breathing Bluegill. Eight pairs of electric field sensors detect the fish breathing patterns, sending signals through an amplification card then analog to digital processors. Ultimately, the software combines the monitoring and sonde data to continually update "normal" states and alarm under non-normal conditions.

Working with the US Army, the team at Blue Sources commercialized technology developed over a 20-year span to protect water supplies for our troops. We feel fortunate to deploy the same technology to monitor our community's water.

— Laboratory Supervisor, Public Water Utility

How Does a Bluegill Act Like a Canary?

Ten million years ago mother nature started evolving Bluegills to breathe uncontaminated fresh water. More recently, researchers discovered that Bluegills and other fish generated a measurable electric field while breathing. US Army scientists cleverly realized this phenomenon could protect people. How so?

As fish move and ventilate their gills, their muscle action generates an electric field which in turn produces a signal pattern akin to a normal sinus rhythm on an EKG. Bluegills, as you would expect, breathe differently in water contaminated with acutely toxic chemicals, changing the signal pattern.

So Army scientists built a proof-of-concept device whereby they piped a drinking water flow through eight aquarium chambers, each containing a single Bluegill with electric field sensors positioned above and below to read breathing signals. After combining neural network technology with years of trial and error, Army scientists tuned the device to trigger an alarm condition whenever the "Bluegill sensors" detected acutely toxic chemicals in the water.

In the wild, Bluegills and other fish detect contaminants daily, but no one "hears" their warnings. Like sentinels standing a post, our Bluegills serve a two-week tour of duty, and we hear their warnings.