The Gulf of Alaska Golden Orb Mystery Got Solved After Two and a Half Years and It Is the Foot Pad of a Giant Deep-Sea Anemone

For two and a half years, the deep sea kept a small, dumb secret, and a room full of marine biologists tried very hard to look composed about it. In August 2023, NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer sent a remotely operated vehicle called Deep Discoverer down to 3,250 meters in the Gulf of Alaska, and the camera feed showed a smooth, golden, mound-shaped blob stuck to a rock with a tidy little hole punched in the top. The on-ship team, on a live broadcast, said the only thing anyone could reasonably say in the moment, which was, and we are quoting NOAA scientists here, “What the heck? What is that?”

On April 25, 2026, after years of DNA work, whole-genome sequencing, and a peer-reviewed paper on bioRxiv, the answer arrived. The golden orb is a butt. Specifically, it is the dead, fibrous foot pad of a giant deep-sea anemone called Relicanthus daphneae, the part that used to glue the animal to its rock before the animal moved on with its life. The internet has waited 30 months for a verdict that turns out to be, in plain English, an old anemone’s discarded sit-spot.

A two and a half year mystery, ranked by how silly it gets

The original 2023 footage went small-virally for exactly the reason you would expect. The orb was the size of a softball, perfectly round, gold-colored, alone on a black rock at the bottom of a freezing canyon, with a single hole that looked uncomfortably like an eye socket. The crew sucked it up with a slurp tube, sent it to the Smithsonian, and the species guesses started flying. Egg case from an unknown shark. New kind of sponge. Coral remnant. Something that should not be on a family-friendly research broadcast. Egg sac for a deep-sea cephalopod was the fan favorite for a while.

Initial DNA barcoding came back inconclusive, partly because the surface of the orb was wearing a microbial coat picked up from two miles of seawater. The Smithsonian team had to pivot to whole-genome sequencing, then mitochondrial genome work, before they got a clean match against a known reference: Relicanthus daphneae, a species first described in 2006 from the East Pacific Rise. The orb was the basal disc, the foot, the part that secretes a dense fibrous matrix to anchor the animal. When the anemone dies or detaches, the disc stays behind. Two and a half years of suspense, and the headline is “deep sea litter.”

The animal it came from is somehow weirder than the orb

Here is the bit nobody is leading with, which is funny, because the actual Relicanthus daphneae is more interesting than its abandoned foot. The animal has a pinkish trunk roughly a foot wide and pale purple tentacles up to two meters long, around six and a half feet, which is roughly the height of a tall man flopping limply off a rock at the bottom of the ocean. It lives near hydrothermal vents and on cold seamounts. It belongs to its own suborder, Helenmonae, because nothing else fits. It is, taxonomically, a loner.

And then there is the weapon system. Relicanthus daphneae has spirocysts, the spirally coiled stinging tubes that anemones use to grab prey, that are the largest documented in the entire animal kingdom among cnidarians. That includes jellyfish. That includes box jellies. The thing has a butt that ended up on the news and the largest stinging cells of any related species ever measured, and we identified it because of the butt. There is a metaphor in there about being remembered for the wrong reason, and we are not going to write it for you.

Why a sea anemone foot took 2.5 years to ID

If you think identifying a known species should not take two and a half years, you have not tried doing it from a chunk of dead tissue at 3,250 meters with degraded DNA. Deep-sea organic samples come up cold, smashed by pressure changes, contaminated by every drifting microbe in the column. Barcoding with one or two genetic markers is fast and cheap, but it fails when surface contamination dominates the signal. Whole-genome sequencing is slower and more expensive, and you usually only escalate to it when the easy method fails three times in a row.

The other reason is that nobody had a reference for the basal disc on its own. Relicanthus daphneae reference genomes existed for the body and tentacles of intact specimens. The detached foot pad is a different tissue type, with different microbial communities, and it had never been catalogued separately. The team had to build the comparison they needed almost from scratch. This is the part of marine biology that does not make it into highlight reels, the unsexy infrastructure of “we had to invent the lookup table before we could finish the question.”

The Pudgy Cat verdict

Mystery objects on the ocean floor have a perfect track record of turning out to be one of three things: a piece of garbage, a piece of an animal you already knew about, or a piece of an animal nobody has ever seen. The golden orb landed on category two, but it took until 2026 to get there, which is a useful reminder that “we found something weird” is not a story with a quick ending. The same goes for almost every viral mystery that runs through our feeds. The Polymarket Paris Airport hairdryer scam took weeks of meteorology nerds to unwind. The crows quietly dismantling a two billion dollar Tokyo DisneySea tower for nest material needed park staff to stop denying it before anyone documented the pattern. The boring-looking, unsexy explainer always lags the wow-clip by months or years, and the boring-looking explainer is where the science actually lives.

If you want a small, sane antidote to the deep-sea anxiety this story produces, we wrote up why cats knead with their paws, which is also a story about creatures pressing themselves into surfaces for reasons that took specialists years to nail down. Cats are basically tiny, fluffy, dry-land anemones with a much better PR team. We will accept email correspondence on this take, but only if you start with “Dear Pudgy Cat” and end with a picture of a sea anemone wearing a tiny crown.

The orb is still at the Smithsonian. The paper is on bioRxiv. The actual Relicanthus daphneae down at 3,250 meters does not know any of this happened, and would not care if it did. It is busy growing six-and-a-half-foot stinging tentacles in the dark, occasionally shedding a foot, occasionally becoming, briefly, a global mystery. We should all be so cool about our discarded body parts.