The discovery could offer clues in the search for life on Mars and beyond, researchers said in October at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
"We're finding that you need to look at things you might write off as not being biological—they might be biological," said Penelope Boston, a cave scientist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.
The microbes were found on the walls of lava tubes in Hawaii, New Mexico, and the Portuguese Azores islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean.
The finds include "a lovely blue-green ooze dripping out of the [cave] ceiling in Hawaii; a vein of what looks like a gold, crunchy mineral in New Mexico; and, in the Azores, amazing pink hexagons," said Diana Northup, a geomicrobiologist at the University of New Mexico.
"That's the waste—the bug poop, if you will."
Bright orange blotches coat the lava-rock walls of Gruta do Carvão in São Miguel, one of the Portuguese Azores islands, in an undated picture.
The ooze is among several examples of colorful mineral deposits that are actually mats of waste excreted by microbes living on cave walls, researchers said in October 2009.
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