snottite
/ˈsnɑtaɪt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A colony of single-celled extremophilic bacteria that hangs in a sheet (having the consistency of snot or nasal mucus) from the ceilings of some caves like stalactites.
Example Sentences
- "We worked our way past the gypsum bank to a small, snottite-laden room around a corner from it. A few days earlier, Martin and his crew had filmed Diana sampling a snottite here as she discussed the strangeness of multiple life forms adapting to such an extremely acidic microenvironment. The snottites held perhaps hundreds of strange microbial species wrapped in gypsum crystals, and also small spiders and gnats that ranged freely up and down them, appearing wholly unperturbed by the acid."
- "[Page 14, column 1] This expedition also began investigating the acidity of drips from snottites in the cave. […] [Page 15, column 2] Inspection revealed that the "snottites" are communities of microbes similar to microbial mats commonly associated with sulfur-rich surface springs, but these colonies are suspended vertically."
- "Highly acidic (pH 0–1) biofilms, known as ‘snottites’, form on the walls and ceilings of hydrogen sulfide-rich caves. […] Snottites from the Frasassi cave system (Italy) are dominated (>70% of cells) by Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans, with smaller populations including an archaeon in the uncultivated ‘G-plasma’ clade of Thermoplasmatales (>15%) and a bacterium in the Acidimicrobiaceae family (>5%). […] Based on combined metagenomic, molecular and geochemical evidence, we suggest that Acidithiobacillus is the snottite architect and main primary producer, and that snottite morphology and distributions in the cave environment are directly related to the supply of C, N and energy substrates from the cave atmosphere."
Etymology
Blend of snot (“mucus, especially nasal mucus”) + stalactite, possibly coined by James A. Pisarowicz in unpublished field notes of an exploration of the Villa Luz Cave in Tabasco, Mexico, in 1988.
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈsnɑtaɪt/
- British English: /ˈsnɒtaɪt/
Inflected Forms
Synonyms
snoticle