Bizarre undersea critter: What's a 'Flying spaghetti monster'?
Source: Livescience.com
Bizarre undersea critter: What's a 'Flying spaghetti monster'?
By Elizabeth Palermo, Livescience.com AUGUST 15, 2015
It's white. It's weird. It looks like a bowl of noodles turned upside down underwater. What is it? It's a "flying spaghetti monster."
Actually, "it" (the bizarre-looking creature) is Bathyphysa conifer, a deep-sea critter that was recently seen swimming off the coast of Angola. Workers at the oil and gas company BP videotaped this strange-looking animal while collecting video footage some 4,000 feet (1,220 meters) under the sea with a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV). Not knowing what the noodle-armed creature was, the BP crewmembers named it after what they thought it most resembled: the deity of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
But researchers at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England, later identified the creature as a siphonophore. Related to jellyfish and corals, siphonophores are "colonial animals," according to a website dedicated to these fascinating creatures. The site was created by Casey Dunn, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University in Rhode Island.
Similar to corals, the spaghettilike B. conifer is made up of many different multicellular organisms known as zooids. These organisms are a lot like regular, solitary animals, except that they're attached to other zooids, forming a more complex organism. One zooid, developed from a fertilized egg, starts the process, and then other zooids bud from the original zooid until a whole animal is formed, according to the siphonophore website.
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Read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0815/Bizarre-undersea-critter-What-s-a-Flying-spaghetti-monster
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still shot:
From this New Scientist coverage
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28022-flying-spaghetti-monster-caught-on-video-off-the-angolan-coast/
Original ROV project website:http://www.serpentproject.com/default.php
There is some great stuff in the gallery.
May the sauce be with you.