Off the coast of Angola, an unmanned submarine patrolling a BP oil well some 4000 feet down recently recorded video of this guy lurking along the sea floor. Up on the surface, the BP team nicknamed it a ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster,’ but called in Serpent to find out its real name. (What? Serpent? Would that be BP’s pet sea serpent?) No, actually, it’s the Serpent Project, which “uses oil industry infrastructure to explore the deep sea,” said Dr. Daniel Jones, one of Serpent’s marine biologists. Oil companies like BP, including Shell, Chevron, and Total, are required to perform environmental assessments where they are drilling. They hire people like Dr. Jones to collect water and soil samples and test for heavy metals and other pollution. The companies also use video and photography to quickly scout large swaths of sea floor for environmental irregularities. Part of their partnership with Serpent is that if they record anything cool, they send it in for classification. Dr. Jones was the first on Serpent’s team to receive the video. At first, “We weren’t sure what kind of species it was,” he said. So, he walked it down the hallway to share with a colleague, Dr. Phil Pugh, and together they concluded it was a Bathyphysa conifer