Not only is the flying spaghetti monster the deity of its own satirical church, but it appears to be a real live creature, as workers at petroleum giant BP recently videotaped one while collecting video footage in the waters off the coast of Angola.
According to Discovery News and Live Science reports, the creatures was filmed by a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) that was collecting footage at depths of nearly 4,000 feet (or 1,220 meters). The creature resembled “a bowl of noodles turned upside down underwater,” thus leading the oil and gas workers to name it in honor of the flying spaghetti monster.
The creature was later identified as a siphonophore, a group of animals that includes corals and jellyfish, by researchers at the at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre. Named B. conifer, it is a colonial animal made up of several different multicellular organisms called zooids.
As the websites explain, zooids attach to other zooids to form more complex organisms. Once a zooid is developed from a fertilized egg, others bud from it until an entire animal is formed. Each of these creatures has a job to do, and in the case of B. conifer, not all of the creatures catch and eat food, and only some reproduce, but combined they ensure mutual survival.
How they managed to identify it
The so-called spaghetti monster is a specific type of siphonophore that belongs to the suborder Cystonectae, Live Science said, and Catriona Munro, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Brown University, told the website that this particular cystonect species is somewhat rare.
She explained that cystonects have two main parts that are both affixed to a long stem. The top part is a bubble-like, gas-filled bulbous float called the pneumatophore. Located under that is the part known as the siphosome, which is where the zooids complete their various survival tasks such as eating food and reproducing.
While many other siphonophores have a body part known as a necrosome that helps them travel through the water, B. conifer lacks this feature, Munro told Live Science. The spaghetti monster also has armlike appendages called gastrozooids that help it catch food, she added, and the ptera (side wings) were what helped researchers determine the organism’s identity.
(Image credit: Serpentproject/YouTube)
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