[HN Gopher] Mysterious life form found on ship that docked in Cl...
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Mysterious life form found on ship that docked in Cleveland
Author : DocFeind
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-07-03 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cleveland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cleveland.com)
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| "ShipGoo001 is believed to be a single cell organism" - It was
| found on a University of Minnesota Duluth research ship.
| gmuslera wrote:
| There is a documentary about it on
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
| vntok wrote:
| Or this one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1031280/
| the_real_cher wrote:
| You can pick up a handful of dirt and there's microorganisms in
| there that are undiscovered.
|
| I was hoping this was more of a macro organism.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Really? As a layperson, that surprises me. It seems like a
| perfect opportunity for citizen scientists and kids who can
| make discoveries right in their back yards!
|
| Where might I learn more?
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Where might I learn more?
|
| the backyard ;)
| rotexo wrote:
| My knowledge is out of date (I was in a microbiology PhD
| program starting in the early 2010s), but at that time, it
| was known that there are a whole lot out of micro-organisms
| out there, but many of them were probably difficult to grow
| as isolates in pure culture for a whole host of reasons. What
| people ended up doing is sequencing a ton of DNA from
| environmental isolates, and trying to assemble whole genomes
| from the 100-200 base pair sequenced DNA fragments that you
| would get out of a sequencer (which is challenging for a
| whole host of other reasons). Then, if you believed in the
| genome assemblies you got out of that process, you could
| compare those inferred genomes to known genomes, see how
| similar they are, guess at the metabolic pathways those
| organisms might possess, etc.
|
| Not sure what the state of the field is now, and I don't
| really know too many specifics, because I never ended up
| studying too much in the way of microbial ecology. If you
| wanted to sequence a bunch of DNA out of environmental
| samples (pond water or something), you would probably search
| on google scholar for environmental DNA isolation to see what
| kind of kits people are using, and then you would probably
| get an Oxford Nanopore minION, make a sequencing library out
| of the extracted environmental DNA using their ligation
| sequencing kit, and then run that library on as many flow
| cells as you can afford (each flow cell costs ~$1000, and you
| sequence a library on each flow cell for 3 days to get as
| much sequencing data as you can). Oxford Nanopore presents a
| relatively low barrier to entry in comparison to the high-
| throughput sequencers used in academic, clinical, and Pharma
| settings, and it gives you sequencing reads potentially as
| long as the physical DNA fragments present in your sample,
| but it has a lower sequencing throughput in comparison to the
| big short-read sequencers. For this kind of metagenomic
| discovery work, you want as high a sequencing depth as
| possible, because an unknown organism might be at a low
| abundance in your sample compared to well-studied, common
| organisms, so you need more sequencing data to detect it.
|
| Then you would run some genome assembly software
| (https://www.metagenomics.wiki/tools/assembly), and then look
| into comparing your assembled genomes to known environmental
| isolates, and annotate those genomes to get a sense of which
| enzymes are encoded by genes in the genome. That all sounds
| straightforward, but there are probably tons of different
| possible computational tools to consider.
| supermatou wrote:
| > mysterious life form on a docked ship
|
| > black goo
|
| Hey, I've watched this X-Files episode before!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| This also gave me real xfiles vibes.
|
| https://alaskapublic.org/news/2024-03-08/feds-investigate-la...
| jp191919 wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking, S3 E15 and 16
| sam_goody wrote:
| I assume that they have naming rights. ShipGoo001 is somewhat
| playful, but even better would be something like
| "ICan'tBelieveIt'sNotTar!",
|
| [and once I am daydreaming, Let's have the leading I as a roman
| numeral - CIIXVICan'tBelieve...]
|
| And, preemptively: 1. People have started "not-a-fork"ing git
| repos, a la LumoSQL. 2. Fedora purposely uses special characters
| in their release names.
| bitwize wrote:
| Reddit in the 10s would have named it GooeyMcGooface.
| sherdil2022 wrote:
| That gives us the right to poke, prod and kill in the name of
| science?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| It's a microbial goop, as far as ethics go I'm not sure you can
| really do better. Eating plants is probably more ethically
| questionable
| vntok wrote:
| The point is the scientist didn't know it was until _after_
| blowtorching it.
| trollbridge wrote:
| And this is how the hyper-intelligent race of ShipGoo0001
| beings decided humans were an existential threat.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| It was obviously a goop before he did that. Do you think
| there was a chance the goop would leap up like the thing?
| He was probably seeing if it was oil
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Won't someone think of the prokaryotes!
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/ancestors
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I don't really know if its possible to go through life without
| harming life as small as that. There's a religion where they
| try, Jainism. They will literally avoid eating food that's
| stored overnight, because it has higher concentrations of
| microorganisms. But even they acknowledge its impossible to
| entirely avoid causing harm, and only seek to minimize it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
| bitcurious wrote:
| Assuming you're not a haywire LLM, if you're alive and posting
| here, you eat. If you eat, you've already internalized and
| practiced the notion that it's acceptable to kill other life
| forms to stay alive.
|
| The study of biology also serves to keep people alive; our
| modern practice of medicine evolved from the understanding
| gained by scientists, studying in the name of science.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| >ShipGoo001
|
| Either this is some official iso naming convention, or their
| department is like my office, where people invent their own
| arbitrary number formats to say #iamreallysmart. Do you really
| expect there to be 999 maximum random mystery ship goos? Lol
| tiagod wrote:
| I think you're taking it too seriously. I think the name is
| clearly in tongue-in-cheek territory.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| It could be serious to the mariner's wallet if these mystery
| critters ate up the serviceability of critical boat parts.
| ;@)
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| And the off-by-one missed opportunity to start at 000. ;)
| kibwen wrote:
| You're underestimating Cleveland if you think this is their
| first goo rodeo.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| We've been at this science thing for nearly 500 years now, and
| we're only up to ship goo #1. What are the chances we're going
| to need 4 digits?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Well, for one, we've only recently started to look at the
| bottom of ships
| RugnirViking wrote:
| they mentioned in the article that its only to be named that
| until it gets a proper (probably latin) name. And that they had
| found "about 20" previously unidentified strands of DNA in it.
| So I imagine they registered it as ShipGoo001 through
| ShipGoo020 in their own computer system
| m463 wrote:
| Since it is a different lifeform, maybe it has 8 arms and is
| octal based and numbered in a different scheme, branching out
| like:
|
| ShipGoo001.003.006.177.004.001.343
| canyp wrote:
| Clearly should have been called MissingNo.
| gaoshan wrote:
| My first thought is that it's some form of bryozoan. Seems like
| most mysterious water located goo is usually that.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ominous Plot Twist:
|
| > It's not some boat-feasting substance like whatever had been
| eating away at steel pilings in Duluth Harbor a number of years
| ago
| vntok wrote:
| More ominous:
|
| > It's not some boat-feasting life form like whatever had been
| eating away at steel pilings in Duluth Harbor a number of years
| ago
| 83 wrote:
| That whole region the dirt is orange from the iron content
| rusting and the lake has been a dumping ground for iron mining
| tailings for the past couple centuries. It's not surprising in
| the slightest that something evolved which could consume iron.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It's possible ShipGoo001 is carbon-based...
|
| I'd go so far as to say it's _likely_ , heh.
| flysand7 wrote:
| I'd go as far as to say it _is_ carbon-based.
|
| >they cracked cell membranes
|
| >they found DNA
|
| Which by the way are carbon-based chemicals.
| qq99 wrote:
| It's the Venom symbiote
| nashashmi wrote:
| Could it be the hard to get discovery of Random life emerging
| from the waters?
| xg15 wrote:
| Strong "The Swarm" vibes as well here...
| bluesounddirect wrote:
| https://archive.ph/TXbt1
| _dain_ wrote:
| was the black goo different than the sparkly green goo?
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