Just when you thought it was safe to run internet cables in the water , it appears sharks have develop the tasting for data .

A Google project director named Dan Belcher reportedly told attendees at a company selling consequence in Boston last calendar week that shark like to chomp on the fiber optic internet cables Google runs along the ocean storey to connect the continent , fit in to internet World , which first report the story . It ’s such a problem that the caller is wrapping its cables under the Pacific Ocean in a coating similar to Kevlar , the elusive synthetical cloth used to make ballistic vests and body armour .

Google does n’t have much to say about why sharks would want to chow down on the internet . One possible reason , George Burgess of theFlorida Program for Shark Researchtells USA Today , is that sharks can detect electromagnetic fields . It ’s a talent called electroreception , which allow them to pick up on faint electric signals that angle emit . Sharks might be flurry by the sign that escapes from the cable’s length and call up it is fair game .

However , Chris Lowe from theShark Labat California State University , Long Beach , says there ’s another account : Sharks just like to bite things . They ’d probably attack a wide-eyed composition of charge plate in the contour of a cable , he state Wired .

Here ’s avideoof a shark onset on a bomber cable :

Whatever the reason , the problem is n’t new . There have been report of shark assault fiber visual cables ever since companies starting place them in the oceanin the 1980s . According toa reportfrom the International Cable Protection Committee , the first deep sea fibre optic cable , built in 1989 , fail on four freestanding occasion because of shark blast . “ pungency tend to penetrate the overseas telegram insularity , appropriate the power conductor to ground with seawater , ” it says .

Wrapping undersea transmission line in many protective layers is nowstandard operating operation for Google , and for good ground : There ’s a lot of money to be made in providing faster transmission hurrying to Asia . Google is currently build multiple crease to the continent , includingone $ 300 million cablethat would plug into U.S. west coast city include Los Angeles and Seattle to Japan .

Image : Elias Levyvia FlickrCC BY 2.0