What lives inside fog water droplets

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-lives-inside-fog

by simulate • 8 years ago

37 5 8 years ago

carapace2• 8 years ago

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.)

foundart• 8 years ago

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

carapace2• 8 years ago

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.

xenadu02• 8 years ago

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.

singularity2001• 8 years ago

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

What lives inside fog water droplets

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