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It’s mind-boggling, no, unfathomable, to imagine the, heh, depths of what we don’t know about the ocean. It might as well be another world! James Cameron’s 1989 documentary, The Abyss, proved as much. And now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just finished a mission in Indonesia, using a robotic vehicle and a sonar mapping system to explore nearly 21,000 square miles of sea floor off northern Indonesia, at depths ranging from 800 feet to over two miles. And they found some mighty strange — some might even say alien — shit down there.

That, for example, is a carnivorous sponge. A carnivorous sponge?! The deep sea is a fucking nightmare, apparently.

Scientists predicted that up to 40 new plant and animal species may have been discovered during the three-week expedition. 40 types of horrors we didn’t know about before.

Further proof: this is a Chimaera. For fuck’s sake, it’s named after a monster from Greek mythology. Which it might as well actually be considering the looks of this thing. Their evolutionary lineage branched off from sharks nearly 400 million years ago, and they’ve been growing all the more freakish ever since. The lines running across its body are used to sense pressure waves, like ears, and the dots on its nose detect electrical fields produced by living organisms. So yeah, crazy.

And this Octopod’s head is looking way too much like an alien on a t-shirt from the 1990s for me to be comfortable with.

Not to be outdone, here’s a fish with feet. You need to decide, motherfucker. Just like Ariel in The Little Mermaid.