University of Minnesota Duluth
“ShipGoo001”
During maintenance on a research vessel, a strange slimy substance was found oozing from the rudder. Researchers who analyzed the mysterious “black slime” ended up discovering that it was a completely new form of life.
Last year, Doug Rickettssuperintendent of marine operations at the Large Lakes Observatory (LLO), took a cup filled with a tar-like substance to a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, and asked: “can you do something with this?”.
What Ricketts didn’t expect is that he had just unleashed the discovery of a species entirely new — precisely what happened when UMD scientists examined the mysterious “black slime.”
The strange viscous substance had been found oozing from the rudder shaft of a research vessel, the N/I Blue Heronwhich had been brought in from Lake Erie and taken to the Great Lakes Shipyard in Cleveland to repair a noisy propeller shaft.
The noise ultimately had an unexpected cause: microorganisms hitherto unknown, thriving in the hot, oxygen-free environment of the ship’s rudder shaft, the largest in the U.S. academic research fleet on the Great Lakes.
The team of scientists, led Cody Sheika biologist at UMD and LLO, began by naming the strange substance with the appropriate name “ShipGoo001” — something like “ship slime 001”.
“The biggest surprise was the fact that the ship’s slime contained life,” explained biologist and lead researcher Cody Sheik at UMD. “We thought we wouldn’t find anything. But surprisingly, we found DNAwhich was not too degraded, nor was the biomass too low”.
“It’s fun science“, Sheik added. “Calling it ‘ship goo’ for now brings some joy to our science. We can find something new wherever we look”, said the biologist at the time.
O ShipGoo001 holds some mysteries. Firstly, microbes seem thrive in oxygen-free environments and in the unique ecological niche created by the ship’s grease.
However, the ship sailed in oxygenated waters and during a previous repair in 2021, no slimy substance was observed.
Despite being a newly discovered form of life, it presents similarities to other microbes previously identified in oil wells and tar deposits around the world, and is considered a unicellular organism.
Sheikh suspects that the life form will have remained dormant in the rudder oil before developing when conditions became right, and the organism could even contribute to the corrosion of the metal shaft of the rudder.
The fact that life was found in the analysis of the ship’s sludge also suggests that it could worth investigating other objects — or other research vessels — that we encounter on a daily basis.
“Scientists don’t often have time to be curious and spontaneouswe are focused and have projects to complete,” comments Sheik. “Time and resources for exploratory work can be difficult to justify. But it shows why they are important“.
