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Old 03-15-2006, 12:00 PM   #1
Undertoad
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3/15/2006: Water Bears, the world's toughest animal



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.
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Old 03-15-2006, 12:05 PM   #2
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umm...these things live on lichen or moss, right? not on people, right? Right?!
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Old 03-15-2006, 12:07 PM   #3
xant
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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.
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Old 03-15-2006, 08:02 PM   #4
Pancake Man
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Bet he can't survive a lecture by my English teacher...
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Old 03-15-2006, 08:14 PM   #5
xoxoxoBruce
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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?
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Old 03-15-2006, 08:24 PM   #6
AureliusVin
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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.
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Old 03-15-2006, 08:27 PM   #7
xoxoxoBruce
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They're free! And they're everywhere.
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Old 03-15-2006, 08:30 PM   #8
jojo
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don't they look all rubbery and squishy like they're filled with stretch armstrong gunk?
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Old 03-15-2006, 09:13 PM   #9
wolf
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Thank you for making them just that little bit more disturbing. Good job.
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Old 03-15-2006, 09:26 PM   #10
jojo
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how come they get to have 7 fingers and we only get 5.
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Old 03-15-2006, 11:41 PM   #11
Elspode
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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?
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Old 03-15-2006, 11:50 PM   #12
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Whatever we do, let's not piss them off.
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Old 03-16-2006, 12:44 AM   #13
seakdivers
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I'm pretty sure that they feed off of people named Bri.....ooooh wait....

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Old 03-16-2006, 02:18 AM   #14
ashke
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Someone must have tried really hard to kill them to
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shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years
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Old 03-16-2006, 02:22 AM   #15
Skunks
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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?
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