
What lives inside fog water droplets - simulate
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-lives-inside-fog
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xenadu02
This seems to be putting the cart before the horse:

> Just how does this hitchhiking benefit you, little Marinomonas? That’s not
> clear. “Maybe traveling or living in fog droplets makes a microbe more
> viable; maybe it’s growing, eating some of the other stuff in the droplet,
> or able to survive longer than if it’s traveling on dust,” Evans adds.

It may not benefit the microbes at all; they may simply get caught up in the
fog droplets, carried into the desert, then all die when the sun comes up and
parches the landscape.

On a deserts-and-fog note: I've always found the Atacama very interesting.
Some parts haven't received any rainfall since we've started measuring, and
possibly not for up to 3 million years. Some parts of the soil are completely
dead because there is 0% moisture. Yet a few specialist plants survive by
condensing the fog.

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carapace
Coastal trees also participate in this ecosystem. Oceanic fog condenses on
their foliage, it's often raining under a large tree on a foggy day, and they
also create fog. When conditions are right you can see the trees exhale and
mist rise up and become fog. Apparently, I've been told, the oxygen isotope
ratio changes from oceanic fog to tree-produced fog. (Not by transmutation, of
course, but by interchange with isotopes the trees have metabolized from other
sources.)

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foundart
Fascinating! If you've got a source for the oxygen isotope variation, I'd love
to read it.

~~~
carapace
Sadly, I do not, it's something our teacher told us during a Permaculture
Certification course. I suppose it could be bunk... :-(

Funny story, I immediately piped up and asked him how the trees did it and he
just kind of shrugged it off. I scanned around the room and only one other
person was also looking around. Our eyes met and we realized we were the only
ones in the room that knew the difference between chemistry and, uh, nuclear
stuff. We talked about it after during a break and yeah, we were both pretty
perplexed by the scientific ignorance.

So yeah, I have to admit I don't know if it's true. And if it is, I assume
there's some sort of difference in the isotope ratios of oxygen in the oceans
vs. ground water or something like that.

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singularity2001
was hoping for electron scan images or drawings or list of species :(

