Hey, short waivers. This is senior editor Gabriel Spitzer sitting in on the mic today.

And I'm here with NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfield Boys.

Hey, no.

Hey, Gabe. Hey, everybody.

So today's story starts off in the waters of the Caribbean.

Indeed.

There are mangrove trees there.

You know those trees, the one with the roots that sort of reach down into the water.

Uh-huh.

And their leaves fall down and collect at the bottom.

And they make this kind of, I don't know, like a, like a mat of, you know,

leaves and decaying debris.

And years ago, a researcher went down there to dig through this underwater

crud and collect samples.

He wanted to understand what kinds of tiny life make their home there.

And he found something that he had never seen before growing on these sunken leaves.

They looked like white hairs or filaments.

He didn't know what they were.

So he brought them back to the lab.

And when he looked at them with microscopes, he realized they were missing key features

normally found in plant and animal cells, suggesting that these weird things

had to be something else.

...