What do you know about tardigrades? The creatures that would survive in space

If you've been lucky enough to see the sequel to Carl Sagan's famous documentary series, Cosmos , you may have seen an excellent animation of the tardigrades, these microscopic beings also known as “bears of water.”

What do you know about tardigrades? Creatures that would survive in space

The tardigrados were discovered in the 18th century, and their name literally means "slow-moving." The first to describe them was the German Johann August Ephraim Goezee , in 1773; He was also the first to baptize them as “water bears.” Adults measure 0.5 mm, so they can be observed with the naked eye and find several in a drop of water (young people measure 0.05 mm); there are more than 1,000 species and they are classified as parartropods , that is, similar to arthropods, although there is nothing further from the figure of a crab, or a lobster.

Its appearance is that of a being from another world, and it could be, for one of its most extraordinary characteristics and which we will not talk about yet.Before it must be asserted that they have been of this world for a long time, at least 600 million years (dinosaurs appeared 230 million years ago and hominids do not exceed 7).They are also found all over the planet, both in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.They like dirty, wet places , full of litter or moss, but you can also find them on the edge of a volcano.

The volcano is not an exaggeration, since can withstand temperatures above 150 degrees Celsius , and also survive temperatures close to -200 degrees Celsius .

And now, the characteristic that makes these subjects truly special: tardigrados are one of the very few living beings that can survive in space , at least for about 10 days.To this extraordinary resistance it must be added that they can resist 100 times more space radiation than humans and spend up to 10 years in a state of complete dehydration, which makes them almost perfect interplanetary travelers.

What do you know about tardigrades? The creatures that would survive in space

It is that they could also live on a planet with an atmosphere different from ours and unbearable for us, since the tardigrads can resist an atmospheric pressure 6,000 times superior to ours.

Let's end with another "spatial" feature: tardigrados can enter into "cryptobiosis", a kind of suspended life ; under conditions of extreme precariousness they can reduce their metabolism up to 0.01% of its usual performance.

For all the reasons mentioned above, nothing strange would have the first living being that we encounter on another planet in the Solar System turn out to be a “teddy bear of water ”, that arrived there traveling in one of our spaceships.

If you are interested in the subject, you cannot miss DNA in space.

Images: thepaleobear, Jasper Nance

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