Rual Lee is working on his boat when he notices something on the rudder that shouldn’t be there.
“A little black drip of stuff,” Lee said. “It wasn't particularly watery. It was, you know, kind of ketchupy consistency. Black. It looked oily, it looked nasty.”
It doesn’t seem to be grease or oil, but he doesn’t really have time to figure it out. So he scrapes some of the goo into a coffee cup and seals it in a baggie.
“I put it in the refrigerator and wrote the little name on it: ship goo. That's the first thing [that] came out of my pen,” he said.
Eventually the goo ends up in a university lab.
What happens next? A couple of surprised scientists. An unexpected lifeform from the deep. And an unlikely mascot for the power of curiosity.
Credits:
Host: Dan Wanschura
Producer: Ellie Katz
Editing: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Dan Wanschura, Peter Payette, Claire Keenan-Kurgan
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Sound Of Freedom
Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura. This story starts with a ship captain and a strange noise.
RUAL LEE: We were down in Lake Erie, and we noticed a problem.
WANSCHURA: Rual Lee is that ship captain, and that strange noise came from his propeller.
LEE: It would spin down and it would come to an abrupt *imitates squeaking sound*.
WANSCHURA: So Rual docked his boat, the Research Vessel Blue Heron, and got to work on the propeller at the back of the ship. And while he was back there, he saw something dripping down the rudder nearby.
LEE: I noticed a little, a little black drip of stuff. We've had this boat out of the water time and time and time again in the 25 years that I've worked at the boat, and I've never seen anything drip out of the rudder post. So I wiped it off. I moved on.
WANSCHURA: The next day, there was more dripping. So Rual dropped the rudder out of its housing in the boat. And it was completely covered with this black goo.
LEE: It wasn't particularly watery. It was, you know, kind of ketchupy consistency. Black. It looked oily, it looked nasty.
WANSCHURA: There shouldn’t have been anything in there, let alone black goo. Rual had never put grease or lubricant in this part of the boat before, but maybe a previous owner had. He wanted to figure out if it was oil-based — something that could pollute the water.
LEE: So I took out a propane torch and put some of it on a rock, and hit it with the torch to see if it would burn it.
WANSCHURA: It didn’t burn. It didn’t leave a sheen on water in a bucket. Rual still had no clue what it was but he really didn’t have time to test it any more. The propeller had been fixed and he needed to get this ship back in the water ASAP. So he decided to clean the goo off the rudder just to be safe. But before wiping it away, Rual did one last thing: he scraped a little bit of the black goo into a coffee cup and sealed it up in a Ziploc baggie.
LEE: I put it in the refrigerator on the boat and wrote the little name on it: ship goo. That's the first thing out of my- came out of my pen.
WANSCHURA: Ship goo. A couple months later, the sample got dropped off at a lab at the University of Minnesota Duluth. What happened next? A couple of surprised scientists. An unexpected lifeform from the deep. And an unlikely mascot for the power of curiosity. Producer Ellie Katz takes it from here.
ELLIE KATZ, BYLINE: Dr. Cody Sheik studies teeny tiny things — all sorts of little organisms that make up most life on earth.
CODY SHEIK: I saw a meme, and it was, “Contrary to popular belief, microbiologists are still normal-sized biologists.” Made me really giggle.
KATZ: Cody is a microbiologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth. And Raul’s boat is a research vessel for the university. Cody was just running a lab meeting when the coffee cup in a Ziploc baggie was delivered.
SHEIK: And it was like, “Hey, we got this cup of goo that came from the ship. Does anybody want to do anything with it?” And so I kind of like, looked at it, shook it, you know. And I may have poked at it with, like, like a pencil or something. And, you know, it smells sort of metallicky. It’s black, it’s like tar-looking. And so I was like, “Probably just old grease that just kind of like started to ooze out.” And so I was kind of like, “Well, you know, we'll see what we can do. This might be kind of fun. I don't think anything's gonna come out of it.”
KATZ: They’ll do some due diligence, he figured. Do a test for some DNA and see if there are any microorganisms in there.So he handed it off to his grad student, Abby Smason. Like, “Hey can you just run a DNA kit on this and see what happens?”
ABBY SMASON: I do these, like, DNA extractions all the time. And so I was like, “Okay, it's just one more.”
KATZ: It’s hours and hours of pretty mindless, repetitive work.
SMASON: It's a lot of moving things just back and forth between tubes. I usually turn on like, a few albums, and I listen to it [14:05] Charli XCX, or like Blade, like some hyper pop type thing where you just kind of drown it out in the background.
KATZ: She scooped the goo into a test tube and mixed it together with a bunch of different chemicals.
SMASON: It kind of reminds me of like when you have an easy bake oven … it's like a little recipe.
SHEIK: Later on that week, they were like, Oh yeah, I got DNA out of this.
KATZ: It turned out the goo was full of life. There was DNA — a lot of DNA.
SHEIK: I was like, “Oh, okay.” That was, like, very surprising.
KATZ: It wasn’t just tar or grease like he thought but some strange substance crawling with microorganisms.
SHEIK: Ship goo, just in general, like the black oozy part — it's like just multiple organisms all living in this matrix of this gooey stuff.
KATZ: Cody was intrigued. So he decided to spend a little more time and money figuring out what, exactly, was in the ship goo. He copy-pasted the goo’s DNA sequences into a huge global database of DNA. And a few of the organisms looked a little familiar.
SHEIK: So I was like, “Oh, that's fun. That's fun. Oh.”
KATZ: But then the computer started spitting out question marks for pretty basic categories. Like, it should’ve been able to say: this bacteria belongs in this broad group. Or that archaea (which is basically another type of single-celled organism) falls into that classification. But the computer couldn’t do that.
SHEIK: And I was like, “Oh, well, that's a little bit more interesting.”
KATZ: It wasn’t that ship goo just contained a few new species. It seemed like it contained big categories of organisms previously unknown to science. And as he identified more, he named them: ShipGoo001, ShipGoo002, ShipGoo003. But Cody’s a microbiologist. This was a little surprising and a little cool but it’s not unusual for microbiologists to find totally new organisms.
SHEIK: It was probably more like a woo, not like a woo kind of moment.
KATZ: What was new was where they’d found these organisms — in the most mundane place ever: a ship’s rudder. Cody says a lot of sexy microbiology is about going to exotic places.
SHEIK: A lot of us get real excited about going to extreme environments. “Oh, I’m gonna go to this glacier. Nobody's been on this glacier. Nobody's been, you know, at this depth in the ocean.” And those are really fun questions to answer, like, “What does life look like in this extreme environment?” And so sometimes it's just like you overlook some of these other ecosystems.
KATZ: Ecosystems that are equally extreme. Just less sexy – like a ship’s rudder where there’s limited oxygen – but life is somehow surviving. Cody realized that maybe all ships have their own mini ecosystems, their own gut microbiomes, kind of like we do. Cody’s grad student, Abby Smason, also thought this was pretty interesting.
SMASON: I was really excited. I think just because, like, I had just started doing this, and it didn't seem like very glamorous work to me. Like, we’re looking at microbes.
KATZ: And yet here they were on the edge of something pretty cool: new types of life in a totally unexpected place. Still, though, it was pretty niche.
SMASON: I was like, “Oh, like, the science people are gonna love this. Like, people who are really interested in microbes are gonna love this.”
KATZ: And then last summer, the University of Minnesota Duluth’s media office shared a press release.
SHEIK: We’ve had press releases go out before and maybe one or two articles get picked up and I was like, “That’s fine.”
SCOTT TONG, HERE AND NOW: This next story is about a newly discovered lifeform found on a boat.
PETE KROUSE, CLEVELAND.COM: A mysterious lifeform was discovered after a research vessel docked at the port of Cleveland.
LEAH ELSON, GNARLYBYNATURE: Turns out that this black goo is actually a lifeform.
IGN DAILY UPDATE: Coming up, a mysterious black goo was found on a ship docked in Cleveland, and “Alien” and “X-Files” fans see the writing on the wall.
KATZ: People loved ship goo.
SHEIK: The extent of it is insane. And I think it's definitely my 15 minutes of fame.
KATZ: People made a Wikipedia page, social media accounts. There were comparisons to a gooey black alien lifeform in Marvel comics that survives by finding a human host called Venom.
MARVEL CUT: *goo sounds* We are venom.
KATZ: And to The Blob, a 1958 sci-fi movie starring Steve McQueen.
BLOB CUT: Very soon the most horrifying monster menace ever conceived will be oozing into this theater.
KATZ: The goo itself had become a weird, loveable mascot for scientific curiosity.
SHEIK: Turns out, if you have a catchy name, and it looks kind of fun, then people are like, “Oh, this is science I can get behind, right?”
KATZ: This is all kind of entertaining to Cody. Because this project was kind of an accident. But he loves it. He uses extra research money to keep paying for it. He works on a paper when he can, hoping it might get published in a scientific journal some day.
SHEIK: In my day to day, and every professor's day to day, like, we're so inundated with everything else, managing students, thinking about budgets, thinking about the next grant that we have to write so that we can fund the students, so we can think about more budgets. Our minds are, like, about to explode a lot of times.
KATZ: But ship goo is pure fun. It’s exploration for exploration’s sake. What he’s trying to figure out now is how all these organisms in ship goo work together. How do they live and thrive in this ecosystem for so long? Could they be useful?
SHEIK: We’re going little bit by bit. We're taking one puzzle piece at a time, and saying, “Okay, we're examining this puzzle piece and we’re putting it in, right?” And we're staying interested because, like, we're building this bigger puzzle, right? And, like, putting everything together as a bigger picture.
KATZ: It all sounds a little abstract. But there are other seemingly obscure microbial discoveries that later turned out to be life-changing, like the famous case of Thermus aquaticus. In the 1960s, researchers found Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium living in hot springs at Yellowstone National Park, which was fascinating because scientists thought it was too hot for living organisms. For years, that was that.
KATZ: But in the 1980s, genetics was taking off and scientists needed a faster way to copy DNA. They needed an enzyme that could withstand heat. And then someone thought, “Huh, I wonder if that hot springs bacteria would work?” And it did. The enzymes from Thermus aquaticus are still used in that DNA-copying process today. It’s a process that makes it easier to identify genetic disorders and test for infections like COVID and HIV.
SHEIK: What we do in science is like, we publish, and we put out these ideas, and then people can go and test them or use those ideas to build upon their own.
KATZ: Someone discovered Thermus aquaticus and then someone else built on it. And I don’t wanna oversell ship goo. Maybe someone will discover something super important, like whether the microorganisms in ship goo corrode metal. Engineers might like to know that. It’s also possible that will never happen. But that’s just the risk of doing science: asking questions that lead to more questions.
KATZ: Abby Smason, Cody’s grad student, is at the beginning of her scientific career. She moved to Duluth from Texas to study certain bacteria that could lead to more algal blooms in Lake Superior. And this whole ship goo experience — it’s reaffirmed the work she’s chosen to do.
SMASON: Even my current project is more of an exploratory project. It's not, like, hypothesis-driven. It's not saying, like, “We think this will happen if we do this.” It's just like, “Well, what's out there?”
KATZ: And she feels like fewer people these days understand why asking that question, “What’s out there?” is still worth the time and money.
SMASON: It's a lot of little pieces. And even if you don't understand the little piece of why something is being researched, it could help with a bigger picture.
KATZ: And that is what ship goo is: a reminder to keep asking questions and keep being curious.
