You may remember back in July when TakePart’s own Gina Telaroli wrote about a mile-long, fibrous blob floating in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. That blob turned out to be none other than algal blooms, a common occurrence in the ocean when the right light and water temperature mix with water that is heavy on nutrients.

However, National Geographic magazine recently reported on a new study about a blob of a very peculiar and lesser known kind. As sea temperatures have risen to warmer-than-average in recent years, the study found, gargantuan blobs of light-brown mucus-like material are appearing in the ocean, usually near the Mediterranean coasts.

The mucus-y blobs, which can be up to 124 miles long, are clusters of microscopic dead and living matter, as well as organisms visible to the naked eye, such as crustaceans, and can even trap large fish. The blob is also teeming with bacteria and viruses, including deadly E. coli. The largest blobs are heavy enough to sink to the ocean floor and smother sea life at the bottom.

The study was conducted by the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy.

You can read more about the sea blobs here in National Geographic.