If you can secrete the right things, you can potentially cause rain/snow inside clouds. You can see why that might be useful to bacteria swept up into the air: the air may be a fine place to go temporarily, and to go somewhere, but like a balloon or airplane, you do want to come down safely at some point, usually somewhere else, and preferably before the passengers have begun to resort to cannibalism. So given that even bacteriophage viruses are capable of surprisingly sophisticated community-wide decisions about when to kill their bacteria hosts and find greener pastures, and that bacteria communities can do similar calculations about dispersal or biofilm formation, it would not be too surprising if bacteria in a cloud storm might be computing things like timers or counting the average rate of organic matter floating upwards, to decide when to ‘try to land’ by everyone secreting special ice-nucleating molecules in the hopes of triggering the storm that will deliver them safely to the foreign ground, rather than waiting passively for a random storm which might put them down too late or somewhere bad.
Sorry, what?
Ice-nucleating bacteria: https://www.nature.com/articles/ismej2017124 https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/bacteria-controls-the-weather
If you can secrete the right things, you can potentially cause rain/snow inside clouds. You can see why that might be useful to bacteria swept up into the air: the air may be a fine place to go temporarily, and to go somewhere, but like a balloon or airplane, you do want to come down safely at some point, usually somewhere else, and preferably before the passengers have begun to resort to cannibalism. So given that even bacteriophage viruses are capable of surprisingly sophisticated community-wide decisions about when to kill their bacteria hosts and find greener pastures, and that bacteria communities can do similar calculations about dispersal or biofilm formation, it would not be too surprising if bacteria in a cloud storm might be computing things like timers or counting the average rate of organic matter floating upwards, to decide when to ‘try to land’ by everyone secreting special ice-nucleating molecules in the hopes of triggering the storm that will deliver them safely to the foreign ground, rather than waiting passively for a random storm which might put them down too late or somewhere bad.