thumb|450px|right|Snottites in Cueva de Villa Luz in Southern Mexico
thumb|450px|right|Snottites in Cueva de Villa Luz in Southern Mexico
Snottite, also snoticle, is a microbial mat of single-celled extremophilic bacteria which hang from the walls and ceilings of caves and are similar to small stalactites, but have the consistency of nasal mucus. In the Frasassi Caves in Italy, over 70% of cells in Snottite have been identified as 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%).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).