 The species was discovered by Heide N. Schulz and others in 1997, in the coastal seafloor sediments of Walvis Bay (Namibia).Schulz and her colleagues, from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, were on a Russian research vessel, the "Petr Kottsov", when the white color of this microbe caught their interest.They were actually looking for other recently found sulfide-eating marine bacteria, "Thioploca" and "Beggiatoa".