US Navy Builds Deep Water Shark Cage

The US Navy's Deepwater Reconnaissance and Autonomous Gateway or DRAG unveiled it's $120 million dollar shark cage yesterday to a group of cheering engineers and at least one congressman from New Jersey.

The DRAG "cage" was originally designed to explore the Antarctic but design set backs and a cost overruns scuttled the first project back in 1972.

DRAG reinstated it's shark protection project with the help of Pentagon Emergency Supplemental funding for Iraq and have now launched the first multi million dollar shark cage in the history of the US Navy. Three more units are scheduled to come online in 2009 and 2010.

"We hope to deploy these units in hot zones around the planet" said Vice Admiral Peter Loyd "we have ongoing operational plans for this unit in the Tigress river in Iraq after the discovery of Bull Sharks there".

The following Underwater Onion was brought to you by Shark Diver. Yes, we know it's been a while since the last U/O but we have been busy;)

Echinochimera-Flying sharks?

Taking a moment here to look back a few hundred million years ago into the world of sharks.

It's ironic that we humans, who have only been around a few hundred thousand years, have evolved the ability to to recreate the ancient world of sharks to a high degree of probability. With the advent of television we can now show future generations of humans what ancient sharks once looked like (see video).

Meanwhile we're rapidly destroying the ancient sharks evolutionary prodigy, our modern sharks, in a manner that might well see a total worldwide reduction of 60% by 2020.

Take a moment and think about that one.