In August 2023, a remotely operated vehicle called Deep Discoverer was exploring the floor of the Gulf of Alaska at a depth of more than two miles when it encountered something nobody could explain.
Stuck to a rock among glass sponges near Walker Seamount was a golden, mound-shaped object about four inches across with a torn hole in the middle of it.
It was glowing softly in the ROV’s lights. The scientists watching the livestream had no idea what it was.
“I don’t know what to make of that,” one said.
“My first guess would have been sponge, but…” said another. Someone suggested they poke it.
The video went viral. The internet named it the golden orb and spent the next two and a half years speculating about what it could be.
An egg case. An alien artifact. A dead sponge. A fungal colony. Something that had crawled out of something else, or into it.
On April 22, 2026, NOAA published the answer. The golden orb is a shed piece of skin left behind by a giant deep-sea anemone, a biological remnant that scientists had never identified or described before, from a creature whose behavior at the bottom of the ocean is still only partially understood.
What Is The Golden Orb?
The answer requires a small amount of background on an animal most people have never heard of.
Relicanthus daphneae is a giant deep-sea anemone, a cnidarian, the same broad category as corals and jellyfish, that lives at depths between roughly 1,200 and 4,000 meters below the ocean surface.
Its body is cylindrical and can grow about a meter across. Its tentacles, pale purple or pink, can extend up to 2.1 meters, nearly seven feet, in length. It is rarely encountered. It was only recently described as a species.
Like many anemones, Relicanthus daphneae secretes something called a cuticle from its outer tissues.
A cuticle is a thin, multilayered coating made primarily of chitin, the same tough, fibrous material that forms beetle shells and fungal cell walls.
The cuticle forms at the base of the anemone, at the point where the animal attaches itself to the rock. It is normally hidden underneath the animal, not visible when the anemone is alive and in place.
What the ROV Deep Discoverer found on that rocky outcropping in the Gulf of Alaska was one of these cuticles, left behind without the anemone on top of it. The anemone was gone. The cuticle remained.
That is the golden orb, a piece of biological material secreted by the base of a giant anemone, abandoned on the seafloor when the animal departed.
The hole in the middle of it is where the anemone’s body detached.
Why It Took Two And A Half Years To Identify
The golden orb was collected using a suction sampler and sent to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where scientists at NOAA Fisheries’ National Systematics Laboratory, which is physically housed within the Smithsonian, began working to identify it.
Allen Collins, the zoologist who directs the National Systematics Laboratory, described the challenge in direct terms.
His team handles hundreds of samples from ocean expeditions. Most mysteries resolve quickly through a combination of visual examination and consultation among experts. This one did not.
“This turned into a special case that required focused efforts and expertise of several different individuals,” Collins said. “This was a complex mystery that required morphological, genetic, deep-sea and bioinformatics expertise to solve.”
The initial physical examination was confusing in a specific way. The object had none of the anatomy you would expect from an animal, no mouth, no gut, no muscle tissue.
It was a loose aggregation of fibrous material with a smooth, layered surface. That ruled out most of the obvious candidates.
It was not an egg case, because egg cases have identifiable internal structure. It was not a dead sponge, because sponge tissue looks different under examination.
The breakthrough came when scientist Abigail Reft examined the surface under a microscope and found it was packed with cnidocytes, specialized stinging cells that are the defining characteristic of cnidarians.
More specifically, she identified them as spirocysts, a type of stinging structure found only in the Hexacorallia group, which includes sea anemones and stony corals. That narrowed the field dramatically.
The team also examined a similar specimen collected in 2021 from a Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition in deep equatorial waters and found the same structures. Two specimens. Same mystery. Same type of cells.
Then came the genetic work. Initial DNA barcoding was inconclusive, the sample was heavily contaminated with DNA from the microscopic organisms living on and within the cuticle, making it difficult to isolate the original animal’s genetic signature.
The team moved to whole-genome sequencing, which confirmed animal DNA and found large quantities of genetic material matching a giant deep-sea anemone.
Sequencing the mitochondrial genomes of both specimens, the Alaska orb and the equatorial specimen, confirmed they were genetically almost identical to the known reference genome for Relicanthus daphneae.
Two and a half years. Morphology, microscopy, DNA barcoding, whole-genome sequencing, mitochondrial sequencing. The answer was a piece of anemone skin.
Why The Anemone Left It Behind
That question has not been fully answered. Scientists have two theories and evidence supporting both without being able to confirm which applies in this specific case.
The first possibility is that the anemone died. When a Relicanthus daphneae individual dies, the soft body decomposes while the chitin-rich cuticle at the base remains, stuck to the rock, preserved by its own toughness.
Over time it would dry, harden slightly, and take on the mound shape and golden color that the ROV encountered.
The second possibility is stranger and more interesting. Some sea anemones are capable of a form of asexual reproduction called pedal laceration.
In this process, the upper portion of the animal detaches from the base and moves away to a new location.
The abandoned base, including the cuticle, remains behind on the rock and can, under some circumstances, regenerate into a new polyp.
Scientists note that observations of living Relicanthus daphneae in their habitat suggest the animals do move across the seafloor, leaving cuticle behind as they go, meaning they may deposit trails of golden material as they travel, like biological footprints.
Whether the Alaska specimen is the result of death or relocation remains unknown.
The anemone itself was gone by the time the ROV arrived. What it left was enough to identify the species after more than two years of scientific work.
What The Orb Actually Did
One of the more unexpected findings from the investigation involves the cuticle’s function in the deep-sea ecosystem.
The golden orb was not just abandoned material slowly decomposing on the seafloor. It was alive with microorganisms, so densely populated with bacteria and other microscopic life that scientists described it as a novel microhabitat.
The microbes were feeding on and breaking down the decaying tissue, contributing to the nitrogen cycle in deep waters where organic material is scarce and any nutrient source matters.
A piece of shed anemone skin, sitting on a rock two miles beneath the surface, was functioning as a microscale ecosystem. This was not a dead end. It was a hotspot.
The paper’s authors noted that this kind of discovery would have been unlikely if the cuticle had not been so conspicuously golden.
Similar specimens may have been encountered before and passed over simply because they were not bright enough to attract attention in the darkness of the deep ocean.
The golden orb’s color, which fueled two years of public fascination, may be what ensured it was noticed and collected at all.
The Conclusion Worth Reading
The paper’s conclusion is worth sitting with. Scientists confirmed the golden orb is not an alien artifact. It is a piece of Earth’s deep ocean, which they described as still holding many secrets.
NOAA’s acting director of ocean exploration, Captain William Mowitt, framed it this way:
“So often in deep ocean exploration, we find these captivating mysteries, like the ‘golden orb.’ With advanced techniques like DNA sequencing, we are able to solve more and more of them. This is why we keep exploring.”
The floor of the Gulf of Alaska, two miles down, is largely unmapped and largely unobserved. NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer and its ROVs have explored fractions of what is down there.
The scientific paper notes that even now, the biodiversity and biology of obscure deep-sea species remain broadly unresolved, meaning the golden orb is not an exception.
It is representative of how much the deep ocean contains that has not yet been seen, collected, sequenced, or understood.
A giant anemone with tentacles seven feet long, living in near-total darkness at crushing pressure, secretes a golden skin from its base, moves on, and leaves the skin behind on a rock.
Nobody knew that happened until a remotely operated vehicle drove past it, its lights caught the color, and someone said: we could poke it and see how hard it is.
They did not poke it. They collected it. Two and a half years later, they know what it is.
