Something tranquil as we round out Thursday: Few corals are as recognizable as the beautifully spiral-shaped octocorals in the genus Iridogorgia. These were imaged in 2017 in and around the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. More from the expedition: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/ex1703/logs/photolog/welcome.html | NOAA Ocean Exploration

Well, we didn’t find them under a pineapple in the sea, but we did spot a “real-life” SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star while exploring at a depth of 1,885 meters (about 1.2 miles) on Retriever Seamount, within the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, during the 2021 North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition. Scientists suggest that IRL, these two might not be BFFs: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/ex2104/features/spongebob/spongebob.html | NOAA Ocean