It glowed pale gold in the ROV lights and was roughly the size of a softball. It was sealed shut except for a small torn opening at the top. The scientists on the feed debated whether to poke it.<\/p>\n A two-year long puzzle<\/p>\n This happened during NOAA\u2019s Seascape Alaska 5 expedition. The ROV Deep Discoverer was working near an unnamed volcanic feature southwest of Walker Seamount in the Gulf of Alaska.<\/p>\n The object was sitting among glass sponges on a slab of basalt. It was smooth and oddly metallic, with a hole near the top.<\/p>\n Crew members nicknamed it the golden orb but did not know what it was. Was it an egg case, or a dead sponge, or something that had hatched? <\/p>\n They suctioned it up with the ROV\u2019s intake nozzle and shipped it to the Smithsonian.<\/p>\n Not a typical animal<\/p>\n The sample landed in the labs of NOAA Fisheries<\/a> and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH<\/a>). <\/p>\n There, Dr. Allen Collins zoologist and director of the National Systematics Laboratory took up the puzzle.<\/p>\n Under a microscope, the object had no recognizable animal anatomy. No mouth, no gut, and no muscle tissue. Just a loose mass of fibers wrapped in a smooth, layered skin.<\/p>\n \u201cI suspected that our routine processes would clarify the mystery. But this turned into a special case that required focused efforts and expertise of several different individuals,\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n Stinging cells appear<\/p>\n A scientist in the lab named Abigail Reft spotted the first real clue. The surface of the object was packed with cnidocytes. <\/p>\n These are stinging cells found only in jellies, corals, anemones, and their close relatives.<\/p>\n More specifically, she identified a type of stinging cell found only in sea anemones, true corals, and black corals, and appears in nothing else within the animal<\/a> kingdom.<\/p>\n The same stinging cells turned up in a similar specimen collected in 2021 by a separate expedition.<\/p>\n DNA matches Relicanthus daphneae<\/p>\n The initial DNA testing failed. Too many microbes were living on the orb, and their genetic material likely overwhelmed the host animal\u2019s signal.<\/p>\n The team escalated to a more comprehensive analysis that eventually yielded a complete genetic blueprint from the orb\u2019s cells.<\/p>\n That blueprint matched Relicanthus daphneae, a giant deep-sea anemone, almost perfectly. <\/p>\n The 2021 specimen matched too. A previous paper<\/a> had already placed this species in its own corner of the anemone family tree, and these new sequences confirmed it.<\/p>\n Meet the giant anemone<\/p>\n Relicanthus daphneae is not a typical anemone. Individual polyps can stretch about a foot wide, with pale purple or pink tentacles trailing 7 feet behind them.<\/p>\n The species lives between roughly 4,000 and 13,000 below the surface. It was first described in 2006, roughly 30 years after its first sighting. <\/p>\n Since the discovery, it has been reclassified into a brand-new genus in a 2014 study<\/a>.<\/p>\n This occurrence is rare, as few specimens exist in any collection. Most known information comes from ROV footage. <\/p>\n The footage displays living animals perched on rocks or tentacles drifting in the current.<\/p>\n To sum it all up, the orb wasn\u2019t an egg, or a sponge, or an animal at all. It was merely a piece of one. Specifically, it was part of the anemone\u2019s base, the layer the animal secretes to attach itself to rock.<\/p>\n That layer was hidden beneath the polyp, which why is there so little information about it. The orb was, in a sense, a leftover, and the animal had disappeared, in one way or another.<\/p>\n What happened to the rest of the anemone<\/a>? It could have died and decomposed. <\/p>\n Or, it may have detached and moved on. Deep-sea anemones are often observed crawling, rolling, even swimming. It may be evidence of relocation.<\/p>\n The answers remain murky. One possibility is pedal laceration, a form of asexual reproduction where bits of the foot tear off and grow into new individuals. <\/p>\n Another solution could be plain shedding during locomotion. The final answer remains a mystery.<\/p>\n Future discoveries to be made<\/p>\n Two and a half years later, scientists have new knowledge of discarded material at the bottom of the Pacific.<\/p>\n Physical examination paired with DNA sequencing can pin a structure to a species, even when the original animal is gone.<\/p>\n That changes how future expeditions will treat odd lumps on the seafloor. A blob with no obvious anatomy may still carry a complete genetic blueprint. <\/p>\n Other ships, including the Okeanos Explorer, are headed back out for deep-sea work this year.<\/p>\n \u201cWith advanced techniques like DNA sequencing, we are able to solve more and more of them,\u201d said Captain William Mowitt, the acting director of NOAA Ocean Exploration. <\/p>\n The ocean is full of unnamed things that are yet to be discovered in the years to come.<\/p>\n The study is published in bioRxiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When an ROV encounters something unrecognizable on the seafloor, the working assumption is that the sample is alive.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-449287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n ![\"EarthSnap\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1766790432_598_earthsnap-banner-news.webp.webp\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\n