The mystery of the golden orb discovered in the deep sea off the coast of Alaska has finally been solved: “Guys, what the heck is it?” What is it? ‘

The mysterious golden orb has been revealed! – YouTube

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A long-standing mystery about a shiny blob found at the bottom of the ocean has finally been solved.

Marine biologists were baffled when strange golden orbs were discovered during a deep-sea dive in Alaskan waters in 2023. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Seascape Alaska 5 expedition discovered a smooth, soft object firmly attached to rock about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Using a suction attachment, a remotely controlled vehicle brought the object to the surface for further study aboard the waiting ship, Oceanus Explorer, above. However, even after closer inspection, I couldn’t pinpoint it.

There have been many theories about what it is. Perhaps it was an egg, a sponge, or a microbial mat.

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“Everyone was like, ‘What the hell? What is that?'” Allen Collins, a zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told Live Science.

Now, he is leading an analysis that finally reveals what the orb is, revealing that it was secreted by a mysterious deep-sea creature called Relicanthus daphnae.

“The first thing we were looking for was gross anatomy,” he said. “Is there a mouth somewhere? Can you find any muscles? Something that would indicate that it’s a certain type of animal? And we didn’t find anything like that.”

The next step was to put it under the microscope. This test revealed that the tissue contained cnidocytes, the cnidocytes that define the phylum Cnidaria. The phylum Cnidaria includes more than 11,000 species of aquatic invertebrates, including jellyfish, hydrozoans, sea anemones, and corals.

These stinging cells are spirocysts, which Collins says are unique to the class Hexacoraria. This has reduced their number to about 4,000 species.

The team then tried genetic testing and detected DNA from a number of microorganisms and the sea anemone-like creature R. daphneae.

Co-author Estefania Rodríguez, curator of marine invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a longtime researcher of daphnia specimens, became involved. She recognized the tissue as the cuticle. In other words, the golden sphere is a structure that the sea anemone secretes underneath to anchor itself to the rock. This work has been posted to the bioRxiv preprint server and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

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“It’s great that the authors were able to gather enough evidence to make an identification from the sample, even though it was actually a debris rather than a whole specimen,” Tammy Houghton, a deep-sea taxonomist at the National Marine Center in Southampton, UK, told Live Science via email.

She said the study shows the importance of both DNA identification and sample acquisition, as physical samples are needed to confirm the identity of little-known marine species.

John Copley, a marine ecologist at the University of Southampton in the UK, said: “It’s great to have an answer as to what the ‘golden sphere’ is. As is often the case in the deep sea, this is a surprise. “Based on its appearance, we didn’t expect it to be the remains of an anemone-like animal.”

Scientists have not yet agreed on which group R. daphneae fits into. Genetic data from a 2019 study suggests it should be called “anemone-like” because it does not belong to a modern taxon, but instead belongs to a sister group to true sea anemones, Copley said.

But Rodriguez, who was part of the 2019 research team, told Live Science that she’s still convinced it was a sea anemone. “Morphologically it’s a sea anemone, and I believe it’s a sea anemone,” Rodriguez said. “We don’t have enough samples to show that yet.” She suspects it’s from an ancient lineage of sea anemones, which is why it’s difficult to pinpoint the cause.

Regardless of which group it falls into, R. daphneae probably secretes cuticles to attach to rocks, but can move away from rocks to move to better locations, and then create new cuticles to attach to new locations, Collins explained. That’s why the golden ball was left there.

“In some videos, you can see cuticles on rocks adjacent to where the sea anemone is,” he said, adding that in one case, a long path along the rock can be found where the sea anemone appears to start secreting cuticle repeatedly before moving on.

Daphnia are primarily found near hydrothermal vents in the Pacific, Southern Ocean and Indian Ocean, which may be because scientists visit vents more often than other deep-sea habitats, Copley said. He suspects these strange creatures may be spreading even more widely, and now that he knows they leave behind golden orbs, he may be able to better understand how far they have spread.