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.