Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

We could smell the cave long before we saw it. Along the mile-and-a-half (2.4-kilometer) trail from the Almandro River a natural paradise unfolded. Oropendolas, hummingbirds, motmots, and other tropical birds perched in ceiba and quebracho trees. Leafcutter ants paraded across our path in this lush rain forest in southern Mexico’s Tabasco state. But as the rotten-egg stench increased, paradise was about to be lost. At the entrance of the cave my scientific companions—all accomplished cavers—and I donned respirators for protection against the vapors within.

Then we descended. Louise Hose, a geologist at California’s Chapman University, led me to a rock wall festooned with long white mucus-like colonies of sulfur-eating bacteria.

“We joke that this cave has a cold, and we call these ‘snottites,’” Hose said. The bacteria oxidize sulfur compounds in subterranean springs that feed into the cave—sulfur is the basis for nearly all its life. Besides the incredibly acidic snottites, the researchers term other forms of bacterial slime “phlegm balls.” Some forms of bacteria are new to science, and some are even beautiful, like those christened “biovermiculations” by Hose. On some walls they grow in an intricate lavender texture, like a rich tapestry.

Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0105/feature4/

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