This seems to be putting the cart before the horse:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.)