Two miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, on a rocky outcrop off the coast of Alaska, a remotely operated vehicle’s camera locked onto something that made the scientists watching the live feed fall silent: a shimmering, dome-shaped golden object, roughly the size of a fist, clinging to bare rock in total darkness.
That was August 30, 2023, during Dive 07 of NOAA’s Seascape Alaska 5 expedition aboard the research ship Okeanos Explorer. Expedition coordinator Sam Candio told viewers at the time that the team could not identify the specimen “beyond being biological in origin.” The clip went viral. Nearly three years later, as of May 2026, the golden orb’s full identity still has not been nailed down.
What scientists know so far
The object was found at roughly 3,300 meters depth on a volcanic seamount. It had a smooth, leathery surface with no obvious openings, pores, or other recognizable anatomy. Researchers collected it using the suction sampler on the ROV Deep Discoverer and brought it to the ship’s wet lab, where initial examination only deepened the mystery: nobody on board could say what part of what organism they were looking at.
The specimen was then sent to NOAA Fisheries’ National Systematics Laboratory, housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Genetic sequencing there matched the orb’s mitochondrial COI gene, a standard DNA “barcode” used across marine biology, to a reference sequence in the public GenBank database (accession MN055612.1) for Relicanthus daphneae, a giant deep-sea anemone. NOAA announced that the golden orb appeared to be part of the base of this anemone.
Independent support for that barcoding method came from a separate peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, in which researchers (Yadav et al., 2024) reported a 100% COI sequence match to the same GenBank accession when identifying R. daphneae specimens at hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean.
Why Relicanthus daphneae is so unusual
R. daphneae is not a typical sea anemone. A mitogenomics study published in Scientific Reports (Rodriguez et al., 2014) placed the species in a sister relationship with the order Actiniaria, the group containing most known anemones, but classified it as “incerti ordinis,” a Latin designation meaning its exact taxonomic order has not been settled. In plain terms, scientists know it is related to anemones but are not sure it belongs in the same formal group.
The organism can grow far larger than common shallow-water anemones, and its confirmed range now stretches from the deep Pacific off Alaska to active hydrothermal vent fields in the Indian Ocean. That kind of geographic spread is unusual for a single species of bottom-dwelling invertebrate and hints at life-history traits, such as long-distance larval dispersal or tolerance for very different chemical environments, that researchers have barely begun to document.
The questions that remain open
The DNA match answered the broadest question, “What is it?”, but left a stack of others unresolved.
No formal taxonomic publication exists for this specimen. NOAA’s identification appears on a summary web page, not in a peer-reviewed paper. No named Smithsonian taxonomist has published the exact sequencing workflow, the match percentage for this particular orb, or any morphological analysis that accompanied the genetic work. Outside researchers must infer the details from standard barcoding practices rather than specimen-specific documentation.
The golden color has no published explanation. Deep-sea organisms produce unusual pigments for reasons ranging from chemical defense to microbial symbiosis, but no study has addressed why the base of this anemone presented with a metallic gold sheen at a depth where sunlight never reaches. Whether the hue comes from structural properties of the tissue, biochemical pigments, microbial films, or some combination is unknown. Whether it is typical for R. daphneae or unique to this individual is equally unclear.
The Alaskan site does not appear to be a hydrothermal vent field. Prior records of R. daphneae come from vent environments, where chemosynthetic ecosystems supply energy without sunlight. NOAA expedition logs describe the dive site as a volcanic seamount, but published literature has not characterized it as an active vent. If the anemone thrives outside vent systems, that would significantly expand the known ecological range of the species and raise new questions about how it feeds and reproduces in different deep-sea habitats.
The species’ place on the tree of life is still blurry. A single-gene barcode can reliably identify known species in well-studied groups, but R. daphneae sits in a lineage where higher-level relationships have not been resolved. Some systematists would want multilocus or whole-genome data, paired with detailed morphological comparisons, before treating a COI match as the final word, especially for a specimen that looks unlike any previously described part of the animal.
What comes next for the golden orb
The most careful reading of the evidence, as of spring 2026, is that the golden orb is very likely R. daphneae or a very close relative, and that the genetic evidence outweighs alternative explanations such as a completely unknown species. But the lack of a formal taxonomic treatment, the unexplained coloration, and the species’ unsettled phylogenetic position all argue for treating the identification as a working hypothesis rather than a closed case.
NOAA’s Ocean Exploration program continues to mount deep-sea expeditions in Alaskan waters, and each new dive in the region offers a chance to collect additional R. daphneae specimens, document the habitat in greater detail, and apply more comprehensive genomic tools. If more golden structures turn up, pigment chemists and microbiologists could finally explain the color. If none do, the Alaskan orb becomes an even stranger data point.
Either way, the object has already done what the best deep-sea discoveries do: it forced researchers to confront how much of the ocean floor, and the life that covers it, remains unmapped, unsampled, and unexplained. The golden orb is identified, tentatively. It is not yet understood.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
