One person great white shark submarine

IT'S four metres long, looks like a great white shark and runs on compressed air. Filmmaker Fabien Cousteau, who is hoping to bring this one-person submarine to Australian waters to study shark behaviour, has already used it to make a documentary near Guadalupe Island, Mexico.
Cousteau, grandson of the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, uses the device as camouflage to film and study the behaviour of great whites.

He says the sharks appear to accept the submersible, affectionately known as Troy, as one of their own, and they defer to it as they would to a dominant female.

"White sharks in Australia may react differently or have different adaptations to the ones near Guadalupe Island, where we filmed," Cousteau says.

Made for a television documentary at a cost of about $260,000, the shark submersible is the design of Eddie Paul, a Hollywood engineer.

At its core is a series of five-centimetre-thick steel ribs radiating from a flexible plastic spine. It is in this "rib cage" that Cousteau, 37, rides when observing sharks.

The framework is wrapped in a substance known as Skin Flex, a stretchy plastic used in Hollywood animatronics and for artificial limbs.

Cameras are mounted behind the "shark's" eyes to feed footage to a monitor in the submersible.
When in use, the device fills with water and Cousteau, in a wetsuit, uses scuba breathing equipment.

Depth is controlled by three inflatable buoyancy bags and a compressed air unit drives pistons that move the tail to propel the shark.

The mouth and other body parts can be moved to imitate shark behaviour.

Cousteau says the best way to study shark behaviour is up close: "You must become one of them and swim among them as a peer to have a chance to witness what sharks do."