The Amazing Extremophiles

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1:15There's a trope in comic books where someone ordinary falls into toxic waste, or toxic waste falls on them somehow, And they emerge either as a superhero, like Daredevil or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or as a supervillain, like the Joker. Of course, in real life, if you fell into toxic waste, you would not get a cool nickname or superpowers. You would probably just get really, really sick. Except, what if I told you that in a canal at the edge of Brooklyn, there are, in fact, lifeforms in hazardous waste that have been kind of transformed? This is Unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton. And today on the show, I'm going to tell you about Superfund sites and superpowered beings.

2:25Okay, before we get to the superpowered beings, I'd actually like to start with the story of the hazardous waste itself. So, this is a comic book. Here's the opening panel. It's a gray day in November, and I'm on a narrow street in a low-lying part of Brooklyn. I'm walking past a place called Wonderful Scrap Metal. Past a distillery, past a home goods chain. Walking past trucks.

2:54That was not me. That was not my fault. Past all of this, there's a small building and a fence crawling with morning glory vines. Behind that fence, there are some concrete blocks, some lockers full of life jackets, and a dock that leads down to a stretch of pale greenish water. It's a place that a guy named Brad Vogel described to me as a feral pocket. Now, a feral pocket is sort of an overlooked, forgotten little corner or scrap of land along the waterway. But we're looking out over the water at sort of the back shed of the city, where a lot of the infrastructural systems that make everything happen are actually underway.

3:35Brad is a lawyer and a poet, but he is also a member of a volunteer group called the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. This is their bunker and their dock, and he and his fellow dredgers spend their time on the Gowanus Canal, a long, thin waterway running through Brooklyn. They paddle along it, they document changes, advocate for the canal, sometimes write poetry about it. Right, yeah, no, I mean, the Gowanus is quite the dark muse, I will say. And they introduce people like me to the polluted waterway in my own backyard. Those are garbage barges right there. Brad, in particular, seems to know everything going on with this canal.

4:16He points out some signs to me, identifies some different things along the water. What we're seeing across here, this is a tugboat company. And then he pulls out one of the dredgerous boats. A red canoe that I hop into along with Brad and my colleague Christian. Shoving off. Now, your feet might get a little bit of a splash on them as I move forward. Just FYI. Brad starts paddling us up through the canal itself, showing us the sights. All kinds of loose past rocks covered with plastic bags. Candy wrappers, aluminum foil. A strand of caution tape. And there's a night hare coming up out of the rookery.

4:53Oh my god. A bird flies up past us. I love it. And then the rocks give way to concrete walls. We pass industrial kinds of machines, boxy containers. You're hearing our little cacophony. It's sometimes very loud.

5:11Talk to me about, just tell me a story about the Gowanus. How did it become the way that it is? Oh my goodness. The canal itself was originally a creek and a series of sort of tributary creeks and marshes. And it's down in a hollow amidst the larger hills that were glacially formed. The Lenape had settlements in the area and used the creek. In the 1600s, European settlers came to what's now Brooklyn. And over the next few centuries, the Gowanus changed. All the bad uses kept getting pushed down into Gowanus. It was a sewer, literally. So, you know, you put your sewage down in the Gowanus. But you also put all of your industry down in Gowanus.

5:59By the mid-1800s, all kinds of industries had moved in. So there were manufactured gas plants, for example, which took coal and turned it into the gas that people would use to light their homes during the 1800s. This process had byproducts, which wound up in the Gowanus Canal. The coal tar really is the stuff that today we see the most of, unfortunately. There were also dye works on the canal, chemical companies and tanneries, ink factories and cement manufacturers. Just about everything that had some kind of noxious industrial process was going in there. Printing too, like printing ink even. And even in the 1800s, people knew that the water was foul.

6:44Articles from that time called the Gowanus a filthy cesspool, a dirty ditch, and obnoxious. In a letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, one 19th century man wrote, Permit me to say a few things about the Gowanus Canal, that dirty, filthy, stinking sewer pool. It is a disgrace to intelligence, common sense, justice, and civilization. Later, in the 50s, Joseph Mitchell published an essay about New York's waterways and described sludge rotting in warm weather and gas bubbles as big as basketballs that would come to the surface. In summer, he wrote, The rising and breaking of sludge bubbles makes the water seethe and spit.

7:28People sometimes stand on the coal and lumber caves that line the Gowanus Canal and stare at the black, bubbly water. Nowadays, the former manufactured gas plants continue to be a source of contamination in the canal. But one of the big sources of modern pollution is sewage. If you live in Brownstone, Brooklyn, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Borum Hill, Red Hook, South Slope, even Prospect Heights is in our sewer shed for the Gowanus Canal, which a lot of people don't realize. It is a charming quirk of New York's antiquated sewer system that when it rains, sewage sometimes flows into the waterways.

8:14There are efforts to contain sewage during rainstorms, like a new stormwater management rule from 2022 and a new containment system that's being built to try and protect the Gowanus. But as of right now, in 2026, hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage still make their way into New York's waterways each year. So antibiotics and you name it, condoms. Sometimes we call them Gowanus whitefish up here, but the whitefish sometimes are out after the rainstorms. They also sometimes see something they call a Gowanus football. Which is a bloated, dead, upside-down rat that has been flushed out of the sewers by the most recent rainstorm.

8:58Oh! Yep, so if you go out, I mean, we try to avoid paddling after those storms because it was a lot of... The end result of all these generations of waste, past and present, is a poisoned waterway. An assessment of the Gowanus Canal found heavy metals, so stuff like lead and mercury, and chemicals that can cause things like cancer. In some parts of the canal, there's an oily goo on the bottom. So industrial sludge, sometimes several feet deep, that is built up over time. The EPA has described the Gowanus Canal as one of the most seriously contaminated water bodies in the country. And in 2010, they added the canal to their list of Superfund sites, meaning that it is a place that is truly toxic and needs to be cleaned up.

9:45That kicked off a cleanup effort. But it also kicked off an effort to figure out what, if anything, was actually living down in the toxic depths of the canal. Which is where our super-powered lifeforms come in. After the break.

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12:04What's in my new sandwich? Oh, okay. It's, um, you got whitefish? You know whitefish? What else is in it? No condiments? After the EPA had declared the Gowanus a Superfund site, they published a plan to clean it up. They said they'd dredge up a lot of the contaminated goo from the bottom of the canal, process that goo, turn it into materials like landfill cover, and then cap parts of the canal with cement. That plan is now underway. They've actually finished dredging and capping the upper section of the canal. and an EPA spokesperson told me they've pulled up more than 70 ,000 cubic yards of sludge.

12:44But when the plan was first published, it left some people with questions. Gosh, wait a minute. This waterway is going to be dredged and capped. This is such a destructive intervention. What is the environment that is being intervened upon? Elizabeth Heneff is an artist and a biologist. And she says toxic sludge at the bottom of the canal is not the most hospitable place for life. This doesn't look from our like naked eye perspective to be a super dense and biodiverse and thriving environment. And so if there's a lot of life going on, it's probably invisible. But what was that invisible life like?

13:26Elizabeth actually came to this question because a community biology lab called Genspace was looking into it. They had brought up some samples of sludge and were trying to analyze them. And I was like, wait, what? You guys did what? Because I was like, this is such an extreme environment that involves doing this like crazy field work in which you're paddling around in this toxic wasteland. And I was like, yeah, count me in. So Elizabeth wound up going out with these researchers and with others and with the guanus dredgers, who we've already met, to collect more sludge from the bottom of the canal.

14:05The stuff that they refer to by the horribly descriptive term black mayonnaise. So they'd go out in those coverall protective suits that make you look kind of like an astronaut and use PVC piping to pull up mud from the bottom of the canal. They had a technique that's kind of like dipping a straw into a drink and then capping one end of it so you can pull out just a little bit of liquid. Same principle, much larger scale. You're definitely not going to taste what comes out. Instead of tasting the black mayonnaise, Elizabeth and her colleagues studied it. And they did, in fact, find life, microbial life.

14:45These tiny, tiny life forms that had adapted to survive in the midst of all this muck. And not just a few microbes, by the way. Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds? Yeah, I think total we identified 455 different species living in community in the sludge. And that's probably an underestimate. The way that they identified microbes was not, like, putting each one under a microscope and saying, Aha, it's Microbius unexplainicus. Instead, they kind of broke them down, got their DNA, and then compared all that DNA to these big libraries of DNA that exist out there. Libraries that have DNA from lots of microbes that have already been identified.

15:33Those libraries don't have every microbe in the world. But Elizabeth was able to find matches for a bunch of the ones that she sampled from the Gowanus. and these microbes are the super powered comic book characters that i promised you at the beginning of the episode they even have a kind of a superhero-y name because they're part of a whole category of organisms called extremophiles if you break it down to its latin roots like extreme being extreme and then phile being loving these are organisms that love being in extreme environments. Now, extremophiles can be extreme in all kinds of different ways, depending on the species of microbe in question.

16:18So some of them have the power to withstand super high temperatures, for example. These guanus extremophiles are the type that can survive on toxic waste, which would be an impressive superpower in and of itself. But Elizabeth found that some of these organisms had other powers, too. So some of the superpowers that we discovered were a whole list of metabolisms that indicate that this community as a whole is able to degrade a whole cocktail of different contaminants that they're challenged with. Take something like coal tar, for example, the byproduct of the old gas plants. Coal tar can have complex carbon molecules in it, molecules which, in these particular configurations, are bad for your health.

17:08But these microbes, it seems, are actually able to break those molecules down into smaller parts that are less toxic. They're able to degrade industrial solvents, like toluene, for example, really commonly used industrial solvent, which makes sense because there were paint-making factories in the environment. And then other microbes have the ability to do something called fixing heavy metals. So heavy metals are toxic, you know, both to humans and the environment. They're elemental, so you can't break them down into anything smaller. but they can be, I guess, inactivated in a certain way and make them less bioavailable.

17:53So make it less likely that I incorporate it into myself? Correct. Less likely that you or, say, a plant with its roots dipping into the canal would be able to absorb it into its tissues. Now, there's also an argument for calling some of these microbes super villains because Elizabeth and her fellow researchers found some antibiotic resistance in the microbe population that could be cause for concern. And then the question is, then is the environment kind of increasing its capacity for antibiotic resistance, which could then be a problem because then if you have all these antibiotic resistant genes in the environment, if you have a new emergent pathogen, then it would be more likely that that emergent pathogen is also carrying those resistance genes with them.

18:42Basically, it's just not great to have big reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant microbes hanging around. All in all, though, these microbes are doing some pretty interesting stuff. So what can we learn from it all? Could we borrow something from these microbes in the guanus or other microbes with similar superpowers and benefit from them? Elizabeth has several ideas here. She says, for example, that we might be able to learn something about converting our trash into treasure. A lot of the material that's in the canal is actually valuable. So if we think actually about those heavy metals or those rare earth elements, there's been a lot of talk in the media about kind of the limitations of access to rare earth elements.

19:30And Elizabeth says microbes might be able to help us separate out different rare earth elements from our waste. So ideally, someone would want to be able to draw out one type of metal, for example. But the tricky thing is to do that with a certain specificity. And that's something that living organisms are actually quite good at in producing proteins that are specific to particular kinds of metals. So maybe we could get help from microbes to make something like a metal-specific protein magnet of sorts, which would help us extract a heavy metal to then reuse. And then on the waste breakdown side of things, if we could learn more about these guanus microbes or other microbes that can break down toxic things, maybe we could help them do their work.

20:19There's a couple of different ways we can think about optimizing this process. One being, can we optimize the microbes themselves? So, you know, they're doing a good job. They've had 150 years to evolve and optimize this process. Are there some tweaks, genetic engineering tweaks that we can make to have these organisms be more efficient? Could we engineer, like, the best possible waste-processing microbes? Elizabeth does not imagine that if scientists did do this, they would then turn around and dump a bunch of engineered microbes into the environment. For perfectly good biocontainment reasons, but also because they likely wouldn't make it.

20:59But you could imagine people making, say, a bioreactor that they would fill with engineered microbes, and then they would put waste in there and let microbes do their work. So that would be one direction to go in. And then the other direction to go in is thinking about how could we modify the environment so that the microbes who are already there would be able to do their work more easily. Would they want more oxygen, for example, or more surface area to be in contact with that contaminated material? Elizabeth also has an idea that she's been pursuing that comes out of her work as an artist. So in the lab, a lot of her work with these microbes involves grinding them up or freezing them or studying them for very specific reasons, right?

21:47But in her artistic practice, she wound up doing something sort of totally different. She and her collaborators put hundreds of gallons of Gowanus water in tanks and just let it be. And we let it grow for a whole year without actually asking it to do anything. As she watched the water in the tanks, Elizabeth saw biofilms forming. So these are these layered films that connect a bunch of microbes all together in an organized way. But seeing them got Elizabeth thinking. Because the molecules in something like coal tar can be really complex. So she thought it might require a bunch of steps, each involving different proteins, to actually break those molecules down.

22:38But what if the microbes weren't doing that alone? What if, instead, they were forming biofilms and kind of working together to do it? So the first organism will do the first couple of steps, hand it off to the next one, which will do the next few, and so on and so forth. It's not a perfect analogy, but I picture something like our digestive system. So your mouth does some work, right? It chews up the food, bathes it in saliva. And then your stomach turns it up some more, breaks it down with acid. and then the food heads into your small intestines, etc. So your meal is processed in a bunch of steps by a bunch of different parts of the system.

23:22Elizabeth thinks maybe these microbes in biofilms are doing something like that. And that's one of the big questions that we're trying to figure out now in the lab is how do we understand how this cooperation happens in three-dimensional space and how these organisms are able to, like, organize themselves. So that's one of our big, one of, like, a big open question. Clearly, there are lots of questions for scientists and artists to answer about these microbes. Lots of things that we might learn from them. But at the end of the day, or the end of the episode, I keep coming back to how amazing it is that these microbes exist at all.

24:10They are the stuff of literal comic book fiction. And yet, even though they don't wear spandex or particularly care about saving us, they are, nevertheless, real, super-powered organisms living in our midst. are airy, small, not-all-that-friendly neighborhood extremophiles.

24:46If you want to read more about microbes in the Gowanus, I will link to the paper Elizabeth co-authored in the transcript. In the meantime, this episode was reported and produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Joanna Solitaroff. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design and also came out with me to collect sound. Noam Hasenfeld wrote the music. Melissa Hirsch checked our facts and extra thanks to her this week. Jorge Just, Meredith Hodnot, Julia Longoria, Sally Helm, and Amy Padula are the fact that the easternmost and westernmost points in the United States are both technically in Alaska.

25:29And thank you so much to Sergios Orestes Colocotronis. He is another co-author on the paper who took a lot of time to explain it to me. And I have linked to his lab in the transcript if you want to see more of his research. Thank you also to Ayman Diegel and to Casey Lardner for their time. And thank you always to Brian Resnick for co-founding the show with me and Noam. If you have thoughts about microbes or if you have something interesting happening in your backyard or if you have ideas for the show, email us. We are at unexplainable at Vox.com. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member.

26:12It is easy to do. Just go to Vox.com slash members and you will get access to all of Vox's journalism. But you'd also know that you are supporting Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. It makes a very, very big difference. We also really appreciate those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform. And we give somewhere between five and infinite stars to those of you who have told someone in your life about Unexplainable. Thank you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back very soon.

26:52with another episode about everything that we don't yet know.

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