Thursday, February 04, 2016

Tardigrade Is My Spirit Animal


After posting this, I realize some people may not know what a Tardigrade, or Water Bear, is. From Wikipedia:

Tardigrades are notable for being perhaps the most durable of known organisms; they are able to survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C), pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.

1 comment:

Peter Apps said...

There's some new work out on tardigrade body plans - apparently they are nearly all made of head http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)01507-9