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Their origins appear to be traced to the pool located in the Solarium aboard the Queen Zenobia, where a maintenance worker noted a seemingly benign colony of barnacles attached at the bottom of the pool on March 25, 2005. Despite the efforts to clear the colony, they returned by March 30 and matured to a size that eventually caused damage to the pipes distributing water to the pool by early April, causing contamination within the pool's water.
These barnacles were later speculated upon by the maintenance crew to be a new species due to their unnatural size and appearance. This speculation would come to a close mere days later after the barnacles had apparently mutated to the point that the workers no longer considered them to be barnacles at all.