Just when you thought the "experts" were busy lecturing us about trivial matters, a team of actual scientists went out and achieved something legitimately awesome. While cruising the South Atlantic in a high-tech vessel, a crew of two dozen international researchers managed to pull off a speedrun of marine biology, identifying 31 brand-new species in just two weeks. It turns out the ocean is absolutely loaded with bizarre creatures, and we are only just finding out because someone finally decided to build a better microscope.

Sailing out of Salvador, Bahia, on a boat called the Falkor (too), scientists from the US, Australia, Brazil, and Japan teamed up to show how real exploration is done. Sponsored by the Schmidt Ocean Institute and the University of Western Australia, this international squad went straight to the ocean's "midwater," which is basically the massive, pitch-black lobby of the deep sea.

For those keeping score, the midwater makes up a whopping 90 percent of the living space on Earth. Yet, despite being the biggest real estate on the planet, it’s been largely ignored. Why? Because the deep sea is dark, scary, and historically hard to film. But the Falkor (too) crew didn't care; they dived straight into the dark zone to find out what was living there.

What did they find? A bunch of alien-looking creatures that look straight out of a sci-fi video game. The haul included one amphipod (think a deep-sea crab cousin), a fast-moving "gossamer worm" (which sounds like a fantasy boss), nine jellyfish, seven siphonophores (weird colonial clone-clusters), and seven comb jellies that use glowing, hair-like cilia to swim around.

The list gets weirder. They found four larvaceans—tadpole-like organisms that live inside houses made of their own snot (mucus structures) and are somehow closer on the family tree to humans than to bugs. They also found two giant rhizarians, which are single-celled organisms so big you can actually see them with the naked eye. Absolute units of the microbial world.

The real MVP of the trip wasn't even human; it was a piece of high-tech gear nicknamed "The Squid." Built by the ship's engineering team, this spinning wheel confocal microscope uses lasers to scan organisms in real-time. Instead of the old-school, bureaucratic method of taking samples, staining them with chemicals, mounting them on slides, and waiting weeks to see anything, the Squid let them view living 3D cellular structures right there on the boat.

Dr. Karen Osborn from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History was stoked. "The midwater is chock full of incredible animals that we don’t know much about," she said, noting that they were basically exploring uncharted territory. Thanks to the Squid and some prototype imaging tech, they skipped the red tape and identified species at near-record speed.