Okay, this may be too much science for one day, but then again we have the moral obligation to be curious about the flight of the spaghetti monster. Yes, that creature above is a real weirdo, and if you want to go into a corner and cry, or scream like a little girl, go ahead, I’ll wait.
Despite what everyone keeps saying, the strange thing is not a bowl of spaghetti turned upside down in water that somehow caught life. Far from it. And no, it’s not Davy Jones’s beard, although I do see the resemblance. But hey, we should put it in front of a piano just to be certain.
In actual fact, the flying spaghetti monster is a siphonophore. Specifically, this one is called a Bathyphysa conifer. The latest sighting, pictured above, was down the coast of Angola where a team of workers for the BP oil and gas company saw it some 4 thousand feet into the abyss of the sea, quietly drifting away. Rest assured, nobody was turned into a spaghetti monster. The workers were actually remotely operating an underwater vehicle, or a ROV (short for remotely operated vehicle – duh!).
Having no idea what the thing was, and being scared and fearing for their lives, they named it “the flying spaghetti monster” after the Noodly god of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (yes, it is a real thing, Google it).
Shortly after, though, National Oceanography Center researchers from Southampton in England unraveled the mystery by declaring it was a siphonophore. And then all the world sighed in relief. These animals are closely related to jellyfish and corals. In fact, they actually look like the link between the two. They are colonial animals that are usually composed of thousands of zooids. One zooid is one of those little spaghetti strands you see on the creature.
Oddly enough, each of this zooids has a specific task to do. Some get the food that the organism needs, some eat it, and some even are responsible for reproduction. Oddly enough, food is somehow distributed evenly, although only some of the zooids actually eat it.
Siphonophores, when they reproduce, spawn an egg. From this egg, a single zooid gets out, and then from the zooid, other zooids start to form, until they get to the size of the one pictured above. Oddly enough, some researchers actually see something in these animals, as Catriona Munro, of the World Register of Marine Species, said that it was “beautiful.”
To each his own then.
Image source: mirror.co.uk
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