Black Goo in a Ship's Stern Hid a New Branch of Life
The R/V Blue Heron spends its days studying algae blooms in the Great Lakes. Wholesome. Science-y. Respectable. So when the crew hauled it into a Cleveland shipyard for propeller repairs, nobody expected to find something new to science oozing out of the rudder shaft.
Black. Tarry. Completely unidentified.
A cup of it landed on microbiologist Cody Sheik's desk. He handed it to a grad student with a shrug. The grad student found DNA. The DNA didn't match anything. One organism appears to represent an entire new order of archaea — a rank bigger than family, bigger than genus, bigger than species. Another might be a new bacterial phylum. In a coffee cup. From a boat.
Nobody knows how it got there. The rudder shaft isn't oiled. The ship sails freshwater. The microbes are most closely related to things from tar pits and oil wells in Germany. It has been a puzzle without a picture on the box ever since.
The researchers want to study more. They may not get the chance — the rudder got cleaned before anyone realized what they had.
Read the full story at Popular Science, July 14, 2025
Hot Take: ShipGoo001 is just sitting there doing its thing, completely unbothered, while the xenomorph discourse rages above it. Ridley Scott wishes he'd thought of this first.
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