The Cellar - 3/15/2006: Water Bears, the world's toughest animal

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3/15/2006: Water Bears, the world's toughest animal

http://cellar.org/2006/tardigrade.png

Oh man, what if this thing was comin' straight for ya! Too bad you wouldn't notice it - the biggest one would be a millimeter and a half in size, and you'd probably find it on a lichen or moss.

AxlRosen suggests this item. The "water bear" is more properly called a "tartigrade", and it was blogged about last week by Notes from the Technology Underground. I never heard of it before, but this thing is amazing. As blogger Bill Gurstelle writes:

Quote:

Now here's the thing I really like about tartigrades. They are apparently the World's Toughest Animal. You can shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years and they don't care. Send them into the core of nuclear reactor. They'll be fine.

Then he posts the Wikipedia link for the little dudes, where there are more amazing facts. They can hang out at 150 degrees C, or close to absolute zero. They found a living one that had been hibernating for 120 years.

Enh. I'm not impressed. Name me one tartigrade that's won the Nobel prize.

umm...these things live on lichen or moss, right? not on people, right? Right?!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Enh. I'm not impressed. Name me one tartigrade that's won the Nobel prize.

Not yet. These things will outlive the cockroaches, and when they do, the speciesist Nobel committee will no longer be an issue.

Bet he can't survive a lecture by my English teacher...

I spent 20 minutes looking at a bunch of sites. The color pictures show them bright red, but they can be orange or green, they have one gonad, they live everywhere and they'll withstand 5700 grays of x-ray radiation. (Five grays would be fatal to a human).
But nobody says what they eat?:confused:

Damn, you think you could get one of these guys at a local pet shop? I'd pay a fine price for a little colony of tartigrades.

They're free! And they're everywhere.:D

don't they look all rubbery and squishy like they're filled with stretch armstrong gunk?

Thank you for making them just that little bit more disturbing. Good job.

how come they get to have 7 fingers and we only get 5. :eyebrow:

We were given dual gonads as compensation. That, and we aren't quite as fucking ugly as that thing.

Can you grow these any bigger?

Whatever we do, let's not piss them off.

I'm pretty sure that they feed off of people named Bri.....ooooh wait....

:)

Someone must have tried really hard to kill them to

Quote:

shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years

How is it that this is defined as an "animal" instead of some other term that more aptly implies "teeny little critter"? Don't we have terms like "insect" and "bug" and others that more fit that size bracket?

& If the distinction isn't one of size but of component parts & makeup, then is this also remarkable in that it is much closer in bodily function to the things that come to mind when you say "animal" -- mammals, reptiles, birds and such -- than with insects?