The U.S. Navy is considering the potential use of a robotic system patterned after the sucker-headed fish Remora to deploy future underwater drones in the sea, Defense One reported Sunday.

Rear Adm. Michael Jabaley, Navy program executive officer for submarines, told a Center for Strategic and International Studies discussion the remora fish presents a new way for submarines and unmanned undersea vehicles to coordinate, Caroline Houck reports.

“Those are the little fish that suck onto the big fish and go along, and seem to not affect the big fish at all, ride in the stream, and then when it’s time for them to go off and do something, they do, and then they come back,” Jabaley noted.

Houck writes the concept is part of the Navy’s effort to explore new ways of bringing underwater drones to the sea domain in order to bypass the government’s long acquisition process.

“Everything we have done to date has been through repurposing of an existing interface between the submarine and the ocean,” he said at the event, according to Defense One.

Jabaley envisions a new class of attack submarines that succeeds the Virginia class and that would integrate UUVs in a biomimetic manner, Houck reports.