VIDEO: Bizarre ‘spaghetti monster’ discovered 4000 feet under water

Following on from the horrifying news that octopuses are

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basically aliens, this week scientists are introducing us to an even stranger undersea life form.

BP workers were filming 4,000 feet under the sea off the coast of Angola with a remotely operated underwater vehicle when they captured footage of this thing - which they nicknamed the flying spaghetti monster .

It may look like a wriggling bowl of worms turned upside down, but scientists have identified the creature as a species of bathyphysa conifera, in the order of the siphonophorae.

Siphonophores are colonial animals which means that rather than a single organism this is actually a colony of thousands of individual zooids.

Each siphonophore begins as a single fertilized egg that reproduces by cloning itself.

"The creature appears spaghetti-like because the stem is contracted up so that all the feeding zooids are jam-packed together," Daniel Jones, a deep-sea ecology researcher, told The Huffington Post.

Feeding zooids. Shudder.

"To my knowledge this creature has only been observed a handful of times."

Forget sharks, we don’t think we’ll be going back into the water if there’s any danger of bumping into one of these freakish, self-cloning monstrosities.

H/T: The Huffington Post

via BreakingNews.ie