Mysterious white gobs found washing up on the beaches of Placentia Bay in southern Newfoundland have befuddled residents and scientists. And amateur hypotheses ran the gamut, from the pithy to the improbable with some suggesting that they were cheese, alien poo or whale boogers.Gloria Ross/Supplied
The people of Newfoundland post all kinds of photos online of the captivating things they find washed up along the island’s 17,000 kilometres of coastline. Most of the time it’s run-of-the-mill flotsam from the Atlantic. Random boat parts. A giant fish head. Sea glass. Lots of sea glass.
Then the white blobs showed up – a mystery that has been baffling government scientists for weeks.
Philip Grace was the first to post a photograph of the lumpy gelatinous goop (sorry, Gwyneth) scattered over the pebbly beach in Ship Harbour, a community in southern Newfoundland.
“Anyone know what these blobs are?” he wrote on the Facebook page Beachcombers of Newfoundland and Labrador last month. “They are like touton dough and all over the beach.” (Toutons are fried biscuits, a traditional Newfoundland breakfast food.)
Soon, others chimed in. They’d seen them too: on Shoal Cove Beach, Barasway Beach, Gooseberry Cove Beach, Southern Harbour, Arnold’s Cove – mostly up and down the eastern shore of Placentia Bay.
The white globs floated in from the sea covered in seaweed, sand and pebbles. They were strangely combustible, with a pocked slimy surface and firm spongy flesh. Flies were indifferent. The gobs ranged in size from toonies to dinner plates. And amateur hypotheses ran the gamut, from the pithy to the improbable with some suggesting that they were cheese, alien poo or whale boogers.
“I wonder if it’s paraffin wax from a tanker that was cleaned out,” wrote Roy Chappell, which may not be all that far-fetched. Petroleum discharged at sea can lead to wax strandings, a form of marine pollution.
Gloria Ross stumbled across a bunch of the globs on a beach in Southern Harbour while searching for sea glass. She also posted pics to the Beachcombers page, asking others to weigh in on identifying them. “It looked like a glob of glue,” she said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail. “I did poke it with a stick to see if it moves – was pretty solid, spongy-like.”
A Google Lens search suggested to one poster that the globs are sea sponges. Another said they might be a slime mould, a fungus-like organism. (It’s not, according to Alicyn Smart, director of the Northeast Plant Diagnostic Network, professor at the University of Maine and a slime mould expert.)
The only thing that was clear was that no one from the public had ever seen anything like it. Neither had government scientists.
Federal officials were first notified of the mystery substance on Sept. 7, said spokesperson Samantha Bayard from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the department responsible for pollution incidents and threats to the environment. Since then, teams of federal researchers have been working to try and figure out what the globs are.
The Canadian Coast Guard dispatched a team to collect samples on the beaches, about two hours from St. John’s.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) showed samples to some of its own scientists, thinking maybe it could be an aquatic invasive species or whale blubber. It was neither, said Nadine Wells, section head of the marine ecological research group at DFO’s Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s.
Gloria Ross in Southern Harbour sent these photos of mysterious white gobs that have been washing up on the beaches of Placentia Bay in southern Newfoundland. The lumpy, gelatinous white blobs have been found on Newfoundland shore covered in seaweed, sand and pebbles.Gloria Ross/Supplied
One DFO marine biologist contacted by The Globe identified a photograph of a glob as potentially polymastia, or a type of sea sponge with nipples, but Ms. Wells later clarified that was incorrect.
“We are fairly certain that the mystery substance that has been getting media attention is not a sea sponge, nor does it have any biological material,” she wrote in an e-mail.
“The glob or the goo or whatever it is, we don’t think it’s a sponge because there have been people lighting it on fire and it burns,” she said during a phone interview. “We figure there must be some type of oil in there.”
So far, federal scientists have discovered that the mysterious globs are not a petroleum hydrocarbon, petroleum lubricant, biofuel or biodiesel, Ms. Bayard said. But to date, she added, the substance has not yet been identified. More tests could take up to a month to complete.
“If enforcement officers find evidence of a possible violation of federal environmental legislation, they will take appropriate action in accordance with the applicable compliance and enforcement policy,” she said in an e-mail.
In the meantime, DFO is planning more field work and sample collection to determine the extent of the curious advent of the globs. “We’re trying to do our best to do our work and get the answer,” Ms. Wells said. “Until that point, it’s hard for us to say exactly what it is.
“It’s really mysterious – something we’ve never seen before, and we have no idea what it is.”