Flying Spaghetti Monster Caught on Video off the Angolan Coast

This unusual marine animal was recently caught on camera near the seabed off the coast of Angola.

A team from BP was carrying out routine operations near an oil well, using a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) at a depth of 1325 metres, when they spotted the creature, which they nicknamed the flying spaghetti monster. Intrigued, they sent footage of it to Daniel Jones from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK.

A deep-sea animal researcher, Jones is involved with the Serpent project, a collaboration with ROV teams from oil and gas companies to catalogue ocean life. Jones identified it as a siphonophore.

Philip Pugh, one of Jones’s colleagues, pinned it down precisely. After noticing that the tentacles do not have side branches, he deduced that it was a specimen of Bathyphysa conifera.