The crew on a scientific research vessel discovered a strange black goo clinging to their ship.
Perplexed, they sent a sample to microbial biologists, who found DNA, but the results came back inconclusive.
This is not the plot of a new sci-fi thriller; it’s the story of the Great Lakes ship Blue Heron, and the mysterious new lifeform now known as ShipGoo001.
“There’s no sunlight down there, there’s not a lot of water movement or anything like that,” said Blue Heron captain Rual Lee. “It’s a fairly warm space, but something was living there, and I thought that was interesting.”
4 questions with Rual Lee
How did you find the goo?
“We had to get the boat to Cleveland to get hauled out to address some issues with a propeller shaft. And from up above, at this point when it’s on the tarmac, right out of the rudder post, some black drips started to come down a couple of days after it’d been put into the lot. The black ooze just didn’t stop coming, and there really shouldn’t be anything in that space. No grease, nothing that I know of that’s ever been put in that space. So, when we dropped the rudder post down, there was just a large amount of this goo that came rolling down the rudder shaft.”
What does it look like?
“It kind of looks slimy. It looks kind of like what you’d think of as greasy. It really wasn’t greasy to touch. It’s definitely what you’d call slimy.”
When you first saw this, what did you think?
“My first concern, of course, is some sort of pollution. We can’t put the boat back in the water until I know that this is not going to create some sort of pollution in the Great Lakes. We’re not going to do that. So I took a sample; I dropped it in some water. It didn’t leave a sheen. I don’t have to worry about that.
“I talked to one of my chemist friends and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you try to burn it?’ So, I put a torch to it just to try to learn more about what it is. Because if it’s grease, it’s a problem, and I have to clean it before I can put the boat back in. But it didn’t burn.
“So then at that point, I pretty much had to drop the rudder shaft so we could properly clean things, and that’s when we had just massive amounts of the goo.”
One of your colleagues took a sample and shipped it off to the scientists at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. When it came back, what did they say?
“Just a microbial life that was unknown to this point.
“So, I didn’t have a clue what to think at that point. I was concerned that it might be eating the boat from the inside out, eating the steel, or something like that. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at this point. Don’t know what it is exactly.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Chris Bentley produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Allison Hagan produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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