Yes, it dies like a stromatolite would if you t...

Yes, it dies like a stromatolite would if you took it out of the water and dumped it further up the beach on the dunes.

A stromatolite can tolerate wave erosion, sunlight, and other potentially adverse conditions because it creates it's own substrate and environment. It does this by secreting a gel coating that protects and captures surrounding grains of material. These mixtures of gel and grains over time form layered dome-like structures.

Stromatolites use water, sunlight, surrounding grains of material, and their own glue to build domes that house aerobic bacteria as well as anaerobic bacteria in towards the core of the colony. They build their own city with all kinds of different microbe critters that come and go over the life of the colony.

At first glance a stromatolite looks like a roundish rock with layers, nothing special at all until you realize what it actually represents.

The "dying" of the soil when it is disturbed seems to correspond to loss of moisture/sublimation, maybe also due to loss of static charge or perhaps a change/reversal of static charge due to being exposed to the above surface environment and sunlight.

I would expect that somewhere on Mars (heck maybe right before our eyes) there are or have been pockets of microbe cities much like the stromatolite in concept. They will use sunlight, moisture, and the surrounding chemistry of the environment to build a protected environment. Bacteria could have an ability to keep moisture in the soil, maybe even help form duracrusts.
It would be interesting to find a Martian bacteria that utilizes chemistry and static charge to regulate subsurface pockets of ice/water/moisture.

I would love to see life doing this on Mars but I would have thought that we would have seen some kind of evidence on the micro-images. But there are probably some images that they won't release. Primitive bacteria might help to explain the water and "dying" issue of the soils but where are the bugs? I'm still very optimistic that they are there. Can you hear them Horton?