Trying to crack the mystery of a golden egg found on the Alaska seabed

Far out at sea, in the chilly waters off the coast of Alaska, sails a research vessel packed with scientists. And they are stumped.

This image, courtesy of NOAA Ocean Exploration Seascape Alaska, shows an unidentified specimen on a rocky outcropping at a depth of about 3300m Picture: AFP

Far out at sea, in the chilly waters off the coast of Alaska, sails a research vessel packed with scientists. And they are stumped.

On August 30, the team on the Okeanos Explorer discovered a mysterious golden orb sitting on the seabed two miles below the surface. Initially they thought it was a piece of litter, or perhaps an unusual coral, or maybe a dead sea sponge.

“I just hope when we poke it, something doesn’t decide to come out,” one scientist said, as the camera of the ship’s remotely operated submarine focused on the object. “It’s like the beginning of a horror movie.”

The mystery of the golden egg has since made headlines around the globe, and the marine biologists on the 49-crew ship, which is still at sea, have been inundated with messages.

“I have never had more interest in my work than this,” said Samuel Candio, the expedition co-ordinator on the ship, which on Friday night was avoiding storms near the Prince William Sound off the Gulf of Alaska, 18 days into its voyage. “This is the biggest one for me.”

He added: “It’s always the blobby things, it’s always the colourful things, which really capture people’s interest.”

The orb, which is about 10cm across, was tightly attached to rocks, amid a scattering of white sponges. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) team, which is surveying and mapping deep waters off the Alaskan coast, sucked it into the submarine – called the Deep Discoverer – via a tube, and are now analysing it in the ship’s lab.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Candio said. “And I’m not alone in that. We’ve been talking to a wide variety of people in the scientific community, and everybody, just from the visual analysis, is pretty stumped.”

The remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer collects an unidentified specimen on a rocky outcropping. Picture: AFP

The scientists are among the first to study this part of the ocean floor. “It’s not unusual to see things we don’t recognise – a part of deep exploration is that there is no usual,” said Candio. “We are seeing places for the first time, we are the first people to lay eyes on them.”

The leading theory is that the mysterious object is an egg – an idea supported by the fact that it has a hole, where a newborn creature may have broken out.

But what kind of animal would be born from a 4in golden egg? “There’s a couple of different theories that we have been flinging around on the boat,” said Candio. “One of the ones that I’ve been leaning towards is some sort of gastropod, like a sea snail. They make a lot of really strange and intricate egg cases. But I haven’t seen anything quite like this one.”

Murray Roberts, professor of applied marine biology and ecology at the University of Edinburgh, said: “I would tend to agree with the NOAA scientists that it could be an egg case of some sort. Several species, including vulnerable deep-sea fish such as sharks and rays, lay their egg cases on seamounts or in cold-water coral habitats.” He said his own teams had found deep marine nurseries off the Scottish coast. “It is the nature of deep-sea science that we are always seeing things in the surveys that we can’t definitively identify.”

Candio said that once they returned to the University of New Hampshire, DNA analysis may help to identify the species.

The Times