On an ordinary day, beachcombers roaming the rocky shores of Newfoundland can hope to find treasures like mermaid’s purses, barnacle shells and a rainbow’s worth of sea-polished glass fragments. The oddest thing might be the occasional moose teeth, tools or even a doll’s head.
Weird, white mystery blobs are another matter.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything like it, and I’ve lived right here in Placentia Bay my whole life,” said David McGrath, a 67-year-old retiree who stumbled across the mysterious newcomers last month.
The Canadian Coast Guard was notified. Beaches on the southern shores of the North Atlantic isle were briefly roped off. A federal agency began investigating.
The blobs range in size from a coin to a dinner plate. They come in an almost pristine white before mixing with sand and turning darker. They are sticky. And they are — this the main thing — indisputably blobby.
After that, there is some disagreement.
Some say the blobs carry a whiff of odor not unlike paint.
But Mr. McGrath said he had not detected that, even when he broke one of them apart with a stick, though that may have been because the air was heavy with the smell of salt. “The ocean was a little frisky at the time,” he said.
Another beachcomber, Philip Grace, said that he and his wife were walking along the bay last month when they ran across first a scattering of blobs and then many of them. Like Mr. McGrath, he decided to pry one apart.
“It had a texture similar to not-fully-cooked dough or foam,” Mr. Grace said. More precisely, he said, it resembled the dough used for a Newfoundland fried bread dish called toutons.
He turned for help to fellow beachcombers online, where people suggested a wide range of possible culprits. They ranged from the industrial (palm oil, paraffin, pollution) to the biological (slime mold, an invertebrate called sea pork and whale excretions).
Before long, the authorities joined in.
A federal agency, Environment and Climate Change Canada, said that in the days and weeks after it was notified about the wash-ups on Sept. 7, it sent environmental officers and scientists to collect samples and assess the effects on the shore. The agency said it had also conducted “several aerial, underwater and manual surveys of the beaches and shorelines” to try to ascertain the extent of the spread and its source.
But mystery still reigns.
“At this time, neither the substance nor its source has been identified,” the agency said this week. It did say that early tests indicated the blobs might be plant-based.
Scientists not involved in the investigation said that while there were many tests that could be performed — the ocean has long thrown up mysterious things to puzzle over — it would take time to narrow down the possibilities.
“There is no one telltale piece of information that’s going to slam-dunk this,” said Christopher Reddy, a senior scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Instead, he said, the mystery might need to be solved through “an ensemble of chemical, biological, physical and geographic data.”
Another scientist, Steven Carr, a biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, said he did not think the material originated from an animal, at least based on the photos. It does not look like ambergris, the sperm whale excretion used in perfumes, he said. Bits of whale carcass would smell far more powerfully. Sea sponges have holes, but not like those found in the blobs.
Like some of the locals, Mr. Carr also raised the specter of baked-goods incursion, though he cited not toutons but perhaps pastries or pierogies that were abraded by seawater but preserved some shape. But he said that without a sample to examine firsthand, “right now I’m stumped.”
Until more is known, scientists said, beachgoers should be careful. “If something came to my lab that was a complete unknown, I would have to treat it with a certain cautiousness,” Mr. Reddy said.
Mr. McGrath, for one, is hoping answers come soon. “We still don’t know if it’s chemical or toxic or harmful to the environment, pets, humans,” he said.
But mostly he hopes that the blobs, which on Tuesday were still littering the beaches, are gone soon.
“It’s not very nice,” he said.
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