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Mysterious life form found on ship that docked in Cleveland
- ahazred8ta 1y ago"ShipGoo001 is believed to be a single cell organism" - It was found on a University of Minnesota Duluth research ship.
- gmuslera 1y agoThere is a documentary about it on https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
- the_real_cher 1y agoYou 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 1y agoReally? 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 1y ago> Where might I learn more? the backyard ;)
- rotexo 1y agoMy knowledge is out of date (I was in a microbiology PhD program starting in the early 2010s), but at that time, it was known that there are a whole lot out of micro-organisms out there,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 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fakedang 1y agoYou don't need to look for dirt either. Your stomach has more than a million different microorganisms that have not been discovered, mapped and documented.
- supermatou 1y ago> mysterious life form on a docked ship > black goo Hey, I've watched this X-Files episode before!
- sandworm101 1y agoThis also gave me real xfiles vibes. https://alaskapublic.org/news/2024-03-08/feds-investigate-large-balloon-found-by-fishermen-near-alaskas-aleutian-chain https://alaskapublic.org/news/2024-03-08/feds-investigate-la...
- jp191919 1y agoExactly what I was thinking, S3 E15 and 16
- sam_goody 1y agoI 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 1y agoReddit in the 10s would have named it GooeyMcGooface.
- sherdil2022 1y agoThat gives us the right to poke, prod and kill in the name of science?
- thatguy0900 1y agoIt'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 1y agoThe point is the scientist didn't know it was until after blowtorching it.
- trollbridge 1y agoAnd this is how the hyper-intelligent race of ShipGoo0001 beings decided humans were an existential threat.
- thatguy0900 1y agoIt 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
- goopypoop 1y agoI'm just glad they got it before it bit anyone's arms off
- fred_is_fred 1y agoWon't someone think of the prokaryotes!
- ahazred8ta 1y agohttps://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/ancestors https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/ancestors
- CrimsonCape 1y ago>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 1y agoI think you're taking it too seriously. I think the name is clearly in tongue-in-cheek territory.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoIt could be serious to the mariner's wallet if these mystery critters ate up the serviceability of critical boat parts. ;@)
- burnt-resistor 1y agoAnd the off-by-one missed opportunity to start at 000. ;)
- kibwen 1y agoYou're underestimating Cleveland if you think this is their first goo rodeo.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoWe'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 1y agoWell, for one, we've only recently started to look at the bottom of ships
- RugnirViking 1y ago
- gaoshan 1y agoMy first thought is that it's some form of bryozoan. Seems like most mysterious water located goo is usually that.
- bell-cot 1y agoOminous 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 1y agoMore 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 1y agoThat 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 1y ago> It’s possible ShipGoo001 is carbon-based… I'd go so far as to say it's likely, heh.
- flysand7 1y agoI'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 1y agoIt's the Venom symbiote
- nashashmi 1y agoCould it be the hard to get discovery of Random life emerging from the waters?
- hulitu 1y agoI thought Random emerged from Arthur Dent.
- stockresearcher 1y ago[dead]
- xg15 1y agoStrong "The Swarm" vibes as well here...
- bluesounddirect 1y agohttps://archive.ph/TXbt1 https://archive.ph/TXbt1
- _dain_ 1y agowas the black goo different than the sparkly green goo?
- mc3301 1y agoDid the St. Clair river blob[1] come alive and make its way to Cleveland? [1]https://petrolialambtonindependent.ca/2025/02/14/the-end-of-the-blob/ https://petrolialambtonindependent.ca/2025/02/14/the-end-of-...