Tardigrade: myths and truth about the “invulnerable” creature (6 photos)

Yes, we have all heard enough stories in which a tardigrade can walk along the bottom of the Mariana Trench and then fly into space for 10 days without a spacesuit, having first gone through boiling, baking and drying. Only it's not like that. Compared to tardigrades, even humans are incredibly tenacious and resilient creatures.





For an expressive look, the tardigrade doesn’t even need eyes!

Seriously, look at them! Where does survivability come from?

The largest tardigrades are no more than a millimeter in length, their exoskeleton is thinner than a human hair, and the food and water reserves in the body are measured in micrograms!



It was me, getting ready for work, who fell into an existential crisis while putting on my second sock.

In addition, the ratio of body surface to volume is very high, which means that tardigrades dry out instantly and are very sensitive to the concentration of dangerous gases.

You look at this little girl and think: “How is she not dead yet?”





If you look at a tardigrade through a regular microscope, it will look like this. Her exoskeleton is so thin that even light doesn’t stop her!

And they die. Tens, hundreds of millions of individuals. The moss has dried up - a pile of corpses. Taken out of the hot spring - that’s it, it’s over.

Outside their natural habitat, water bears live no more than 5 minutes. And for the scientists who study them, this is a real problem!

Tardigrades are such sissies that it is extremely difficult to raise them in artificial conditions!



The exact number of tardigrade species is unknown. But there are no less than a thousand of them!

In order for the animal to gain incredible stability, it needs to be given time, usually several hours. Then the animal will have time to fall into cryptobiosis, go into a dormant form, which is truly resistant to various conditions.

But even here everything is far from so good.



When you are labeled as an unkillable animal, and you are just a sweet bun.

Tardigrades have different forms of cryptobiosis, and each one protects against something specific. The cyst form, to create which the animal quickly molts several times and remains inside the skins, provides good protection against small predators and contact with toxins, but is almost useless against desiccation. With cryobiosis, the animal pumps itself full of antifreeze and is able to withstand the winter, but becomes extremely vulnerable to heat.

And some of the tardigrades also lost part of their protective forms.

Marine species, for example, generally do not know how to fall into anhydrobiosis, designed to survive drought. And anoxybiosis, a regime in which an invertebrate experiences a lack of oxygen, is inaccessible to species living in moss.



Tardigrade and Tardigrade.zip

Fantasies once again crashed into reality. Tardigrades are incredibly cool, they are full of mysteries and have fascinated scientists for centuries. But they do not have any supernatural invulnerability. They are simply a well-adapted and extremely successful group of animals.

That, however, did not stop them from populating almost the entire planet!