This is a metaphor I wrote on a whim.

Although you may not know me,

I am the strongest animal on Earth.

I can live at the bottom of the deepest sea,

In places colder than the Arctic,

Or in places hotter than El Azizia.

I have been to space

And have survived its vacuum.

You can’t find me in a zoo,

Like a polar bear or a chimpanzee.

You can’t see me without help,

But I always see you

As I sip the water

From the moss.

Open your mind

To all the life around you.

I may be small,

But I matter too.

© 2012 Julia Simoneau

Ecologists refer to the large animals people go to zoos to see as “charismatic megafauna.” The microscopic tardigrade—which is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence—surely qualifies as charismatic microfauna. It trundles about its moss, lichen, or leaf-litter habitat on stubby limbs like an eight-legged panda. The tardigrade (whose name means “slow walker”) may be the only invertebrate universally regarded as “cute.”

Tardigrades also may be the toughest creatures on the planet. When the habitat they favor dries up, so do they, through a process of cryptobiosis, into dustlike specks called tuns. In a desiccated state of suspended animation, they can be blown by the wind until they encounter a moist, hospitable location, whereupon they rehydrate and resume their active lives.

During their dehydrated period, tardigrades can tolerate nearly anything. They’ve been exposed to temperatures of minus 272.95 degrees Celsius (functional absolute zero) and 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit) and survived, none the worse for wear. They’ve even been exposed to solar heat and radiation in the vacuum of space and returned home to Earth to move, eat, grow, and reproduce. The latter isn’t hard, since many are also parthenogenetic (i.e., they can give birth without the bother of sex). –William R. Miller

Published in Sierra Club on line:

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201203/grapple-charismatic-microfauna-tarigrade-127.aspx

Your comments please!

Mike Shaw

Thanks, Hank!
Rgds,
Mike Shaw

CreatureCast – Tardigrades from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

A big thank you and shout out to:
Katherine Hadley and Jonathan Leibovic, from Casey Dunn’s Invertebrate Zoology (Biol 0410) course at Brown University, sing a song about tardigrades. They composed the song, performed it with friends, and made the animation.

The hand-drawn animations were photographed at the Brown University Science Center (http://brown.edu/academics/science-center/). This video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

From website: http://creaturecast.org/archives/2407-creaturecast-tardigrades

Salt Crystals with Rheinberg Illumination

More on this topic here on my site (tab above); click here…

Please leave article feed back right here, below.  Thanks !

Mike Shaw

Tardigrade Themed Sweater

See the link above.  Read my post at the bottom of that blog, and add your own comments!

Want more tardigrade stuff – see the plush toy here.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/dec/04/nothing-frozen-in-biomatricas-storage-process/?page=1#article

This will be useful for forensics!

You probably know that tardigrades are found just about everywhere. We even sent them up into space! But did you know they’ve been found in Antarctica?  Read this abstract of Dr. Miller’s paper.

More about tardigrades in Antarctica here…

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/2177-weird-wildlife-real-animals-antarctica-penguins.html

Would love your comments!