Cave Balls

Yee-hah! Made it onto B3ta's Best page for this week's Question of the Week: "What hidden treasures have you uncovered?"

My story below concerns an occasional destination back in early college days: Ojo del Diablo Cave, in the broken foothills of the Jemez Mountains, a few miles west of San Ysidro, New Mexico:

The four of us had nearly finished scrambling through a New Mexico cave when we came across a clear pool blocking our path: we were forced to wade to the exit. We noticed the bottom of the pool was littered with numerous white balls.

The mystery began to gnaw on us: what were these ghostly, golfball-like spheres? We touched one ball, and the white coating suddenly popped and drifted away, leaving a central mudball-like core with what appeared to be little sticks poking out. In the flickering light, we could see there was some kind of strange gas streaming away from the mudball, which just deepened the mystery. We combined our brainpower to decipher the mudball's mystery.

It took a long, long time, passing the mudball back and forth from hand to hand, sniffing the gas, and reaching into the waters to gather other popping mudballs, to finally realize that THIS is what ultimately happens to bats that die and fall into limpid cave waters.