Meet the tardigrade, or ‘water bear.’ It’s a pipsqueak—about the size of a period. Check it out under a microscope. It looks part chubby bear and part one-eyed alien! Tardigrades are kind of cute . . . and almost impossible to kill.
No water? No worries. Tardigrades survive. Antarctic cold, 300-degree heat, a lack of oxygen, and even radiation don’t stop these animals. There are as many as 1,200 species of tardigrades. They live all over Earth: on mountaintops, deep in the ocean, and maybe even in your driveway! They eat algae and water plants. They have eight legs. The rear two face backward. The front six face forward. But tardigrades don’t have a skeleton or circulatory system (the parts of the body that pump blood.) This can sometimes make them able to curl up into hyper-survival mode—“cryptobiosis.” Not all come back from cryptobiosis. But most do.
In 2007, scientists put two species of tardigrades in containers. They launched them into space. The water bears were exposed to cold, airless space full of radiation from the Sun and stars. A person in that situation would explode! But tardigrades lived. Later, they multiplied. The offspring from those tardigrade astronauts are still alive.
How to Use a Tardigrade
When the going gets tough for tardigrades, they curl up. They dry out. They wait. When the environment gets better and they get water, they spring back to life. Some can wait for decades before becoming active again
Biologists study tardigrades’ teeny-tiny genes. They think putting those genes into other parts of creation—such as crops—could help crops survive drought just like tardigrades do. Scientists have other plans too. One hopes to use tardigrade tricks to make bags of blood last longer. Now blood lasts about six weeks in a bag. Scientists hope blood could be stored dried. Then soldiers could take their own blood supply into battle. Ambulances could carry more blood needed for emergencies. Scientists wonder about vaccines too. Now vaccines have to be kept cold. That’s challenging. Could a tardigrade technique help with that too? Could tardigrade tech help preserve human organs?
Japanese scientists study whether tardigrade proteins could help them come up with a better sunscreen. Remember how those tardigrades survived radiation in space? Maybe, scientists think, their DNA could protect people from dangerous radiation from the Sun.
For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on Earth, visible and invisible. ― Colossians 1:16
