I'm not talking about some kind of Creature from the Swamps but about a recent (2026) discovery that the tiny water droplets in fog are home to populations of bacteria [1].
The bacteria grow and divide in the water droplets, so it looks as though they like it there, and amazingly they can eat formaldehyde and break it down into carbon dioxide and water; in fact it appears they break down more than they can eat and it's thought that this is because too much of it would harm them. Formaldehyde is harmful to human health [2] and the waterborne bacterial may play a useful part in purifying the air.
That's what made me think about formaldehyde as a domestic pollutant. Friends have Dyson air purifiers and removing formaldehyde is an important part of what these devices do.
So maybe the bacteria in water droplets have an important role in cleansing air. And I wonder if they exist in clouds, which are just fog high up. It may be hard to find out; the researchers had difficulty getting the fog samples they wanted because wind disturbs the fog and getting good samples from clouds thousands of feet up where winds are much stronger would be difficult.
I have to thank science YouTuber Anton Petrov for his video which put me on to this research.
In the Phys.Org article I read, one of the researchers was quoted at the end as cracking a joke, so I'll end with (a rather appropriate) joke too.
I tried to catch some fog. But I missed.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2026-05-fog-alive-droplets-host-bacteria.html#google_vignette
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Who would have thought that!
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Yes indeed, the more we look at the world the more we find things we never imagined.