China fears espionage in its maritime waters using ‘spy turtles’ and ‘spy fish’
China has alleged that 'spy turtles' are being used in maritime espionage operations. Image Courtesy: Representative picture via Wikimedia Commons.
New Delhi: China’s security agencies have issued a warning of espionage by foreign powers in its maritime waters, deploying listening devices fitted on sea turtles and fish. The warning, issued by the Chinese ministry of state security, was posted on the WeChat messaging platform on Friday, claiming “an invisible secret war” was being waged against Beijing from the seas.
The security alert blamed foreign secret services and intelligence agencies for collecting sensitive data “through a variety of new spying devices” to map Chinese territorial waters, which posed a “serious threat to national security”. The alert claimed that among the espionage techniques used were large marine animals, including “spy turtles” and “spy fish” that were found “attached to sensors” as they swarm in Chinese waters.
These animals were “collecting sensitive marine environment data such as water temperature, salinity, and ocean currents in real time, and transmitting them overseas via satellite,” it said. The warning did not provide any specific details about when and where such “spy” sea animals were detected, or which nation had deployed the listening devices.
Intelligence alerts regarding the use of sea animals for spying are not new. In 2023, British intelligence said Russia was increasing its security apparatus at its Sevastapol Black Sea fleet’s base in Crimea peninsula, deploying trained dolphins fitted with monitoring devices that would send an alert back to Russian security agencies on enemy submarine drone attacks and to counter enemy divers and diving operations.
But Beijing’s warning only mentioned finding buoys “deployed by an overseas marine research institute, equipped with a meteorological sensor package” that allowed tracking of acoustic signatures of Chinese submarines in real time. It also cited a new type of “wave glider” powered by wave motion and solar energy, deployed by foreign actors to transmit “military-related maritime environmental data and information on vessel activities.”
Such Chinese ministry of state security alerts are a regular feature, and these warnings frequently claim espionage threats in maritime waters, such as the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait. These maritime regions are some of the militarily active and security-sensitive regions for China. In 2024, a similar alert claimed Chinese intelligence agencies had found “lighthouses” on the ocean floor that guided foreign submarines in a “pre-set battlefield”, without explaining how they reached there in the first place.
