• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“ShipGoo001”: Mystery Of Entirely New Lifeform Discovered Coating A Great Lakes Ship

July 7, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

Researchers investigating a strange “goo” discovered when maintaining a ship in Cleveland have discovered an entirely new lifeform.

Last September, the research vessel Blue Heron – the largest US academic research fleet vessel on the Great Lakes – was brought out of Lake Erie and into the Great Lakes Shipyard to fix a noisy propeller shaft. During maintenance, a strange goo was found oozing out of the ship’s rudder shaft. 

Large Lakes Observatory (LLO) Marine Superintendent Doug Ricketts contacted researchers at the University of Minnesota Duluth, asking them to investigate. While he and the researchers were not expecting to find much of interest, to their surprise, the goo contained life; microbes thriving in the semi-warm, oxygen-less environment.

“The biggest surprise was that the ship goo had life in it at all,” biologist and lead researcher Cody Sheik explained in a statement. “We thought we’d find nothing. But surprisingly, we found DNA and it wasn’t too destroyed, nor was the biomass too low.”

Sequencing the DNA and comparing it to global databases, the team found that the goo contained a species unknown to science, which they have dubbed “ShipGoo001”. 

“It’s fun science,” Sheik added. “By calling it ship goo for now, it brings some joy to our science. We can find novelty wherever we look.”

A greasy pole on a ship.

Where the new microbes were found.

Image courtesy of University of Minnesota Duluth

ShipGoo001 comes with a few mysteries attached. For one, the microbes appear to thrive in environments with no oxygen, and in the unique ecological niche created by the ship’s grease. Yet the ship traveled through oxygenated waters, and during a previous repair in 2021, no goo was observed either.

Though a newly discovered lifeform, it is similar to other microbes previously discovered in petroleum wells and tar pits around the world, and is thought to be a single-cell organism. Sheik suspects that the lifeform remained dormant in the rudder oil before growing later when the conditions were right, and that the organism may even contribute to erosion of the metal rudder shaft.

As yet, we don’t know much more than that, though the team will continue to investigate the organism and its metabolic processes, and make the genome publicly available and publish their findings in due course. The fact that life was found while analyzing the ship’s goo, however, implies that it might be worth investigating other objects (or other research vessels) we come across every day.

“Scientists don’t often have time to be playful – we’re focused and have projects to complete,” Sheik added. “Time and resources for exploratory work can be daunting. But this shows why it matters.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Audi launches its newest EV, the 2022 Q4 e-tron SUV
  2. Dinosaur Prints Found Under Restaurant Table Confirmed As 100 Million Years Old
  3. Archax: Japanese Engineers Make Transformer Robot That Actually Works
  4. How Do We Know There Is Anything Beyond The Observable Universe?

Source Link: "ShipGoo001": Mystery Of Entirely New Lifeform Discovered Coating A Great Lakes Ship

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Watch: 18-Kilometer-High Ash Cloud Looms Over Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki After “Explosive” Eruption
  • “ShipGoo001”: Mystery Of Entirely New Lifeform Discovered Coating A Great Lakes Ship
  • Rare White Humpback Whale Calf Filmed By Drone Off Australia’s East Coast
  • Who Was Buried At Cave Of Salome: A Female Disciple, Jesus’ Midwife, Or A Princess?
  • “Hidden” Changes To US Health Data Swapping “Gender” For “Sex” Spark Fears For Public Trust
  • Easter Island Was Never As Isolated As We Thought – Study Puts That “Strange Argument” To Bed
  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Why Are So Many Enormous Roman Shoes Being Discovered At Hadrian’s Wall?
  • Scientists Think They’ve Pinpointed Structural Differences In Psychopaths’ Brains
  • We’ve Found Our Third-Ever Interstellar Visitor, Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild, And Much More This Week
  • The “Eyes Of Clavius” Will Be Visible On The Moon Today, Thanks To Clair-Obscur Effect
  • Shockingly High Microplastic Levels Found On Remote Mediterranean Coral Reef Island
  • Interstellar Object, Cheesy Nightmares, And Smooching Orcas
  • World’s Largest Martian Meteorite Up For Auction Could Reach Whopping $2-4 Million
  • Kimalu The Beluga Whale Undergoes Pioneering Surgery And Becomes First Beluga To Survive General Aesthetic
  • The 1986 Soviet Space Mission That’s Never Been Repeated: Mir To Salyut And Back Again
  • Grisly Incident In Yellowstone National Park Shows Just How Dangerous This Vibrant Wilderness Can Be
  • Out Of All Greenhouse Gas Emitters On Earth, One US Organization Takes The Biscuit
  • Overly Ambitious Adder Attempts To Eat Hare 10 Times Its Mass In Gnarly Video
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version