A newly found Atacama Desert soil community survives on sips of fog
Perhaps the hardiest assemblage of lichens and other fungi and algae yet found has been hiding in plain sight in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. This newly discovered “grit-crust,” as ecologists have named it, coats tiny stones and draws moisture from daily pulses of coastal fog that roll across the world’s driest nonpolar desert. These communities are optimized to photosynthesize using less than half of the water that other known desert biological soil crusts use, researchers report December 16 in Geobiology. The “super cool” find suggests that soil communities can eke out a living in the planet’s harshest settings, says Jayne Belnap, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist based in Moab, Utah, who was not involved in the study. Biological soil crusts, or biocrusts, are conglomerations of algae, cyanobacteria, lichens, fungi or mosses that cover an estimated 12 percent of the land on Earth. They are commonly found in deserts, where they blanket the soil and prevent erosion. They also shape ecosystems by drawing atmospheric carbon and...