Tardigrades – The Toughest Little Living Thing on Earth
Never mind the fascinating story of the frozen Frogs. There are tiny creatures on this planet that are tougher than any other you could name, and you could easily find some in your garden. Known affectionately by many as Water Bears, or Moss Piglets, Tardigrades are without doubt the greatest survivors in all of nature.
These tiny wonders creatures can be found everywhere, be it 20,000ft up in the Himalayas , down to as deep as 13,000ft below the surface of the seas. Studied by biologists in environments ranging from the hottest deserts to underneath the Antarctic ice, but if truth be told water bears are most content when living on damp moss. Being aquatic, they also do well wherever there is moisture available.
Discovered in 1773 by zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze, to date over nine hundred species have been discovered, mostly inhabiting mosses, lichens, and several kinds of sediments. The truly incredible aspect of the moss piglet is their resilience.
You can freeze them, and they can survive temperatures as low as -272 degrees Celsius ( nowhere on earth is that cold naturally, you need to send them into space) or boil them to as mush as 181 degrees Celsius (almost double the temperature of boiling water). You could try to dry them out, but ten years without water will not see them off, or you could expose them to radiation, but they can stand almost 6,000 grays of radioactivity.
When you consider that the most a human can stand before dying is about 20 grays (one gray equaling around five thousand X-rays of the body), you begin to understand just how hardy these unbelievable little beasts are. They can happily withstand life at temperatures that would literally decimate any other life form, either hot or cold, and have life-spans that humanity has dreamed of achieving since the beginning of time.
Be it at the hellish mouths of underwater volcanic vents, wandering through outer space for two centuries, laid deep within the coldest places on the planet, these tiny, 1mm long creatures are so incredibly tough that, no matter what you think of doing to them, they will survive. There could easily be hundreds of them within feet of your present position, and you had no idea.
When it comes to handing out plaudits for survival skills, surely nothing can even come close to rivaling the miniature powerhouses called water bears for being such impressive masters of survival. Nature truly is more diverse and wonderful than any of us can begin to imagine.
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