Tardigrades are so tough, they can survive outer space | Hacker News Reader

Tardigrades are so tough, they can survive outer space

bbc.com

227 pointswasi001384 comments

I found a tardigrade while using my microscope to look at pond water. Man, they look funny and dopey and move around very clumsily. Not exactly what you'd think would be the toughest animal around. I would have put my money on rotifers.

Your comment made me understand that I've never seen them moving.

I've found this video https://youtu.be/F5fg64rmFHE?t=15m19s that shows them.

My mind is so blown. They are so small but so animal like... !

Nitpick: Tardigrades are animals.

Sorry, meant mammals.

Holy crap! It moves just like a mouse/rat moves. Really surprised me. Thank you!

Rotifers are interesting in their own way. They are an example of an animal where their sex is determined by what environmental conditions their parents were in. We normally think of sex determination as something that happens at conception, but with rotifers it is much before that.

There's actually some evidence and theory to suggest that sex of human children is determined by their mother's stress level: http://www.economist.com/node/10130882

So it's not clear-cut even in our species!

To be clear, in humans that's a 5-10% shift in probability, and no evidence to suggest that the effect is determined post-conception (an extraordinary conjecture) and not statistical miscarriage pressure.

Just the other day I read a fascinating (to me) Quora reply to the question "What can happen if a human eats a water bear (the most resistant living organism), or gets a water bear in their blood stream?"

Short answer: it gets dissolved in the stomach acid and dies.

Long answer here: http://www.quora.com/What-can-happen-if-a-human-eats-a-water...

Off topic question: What kind of nutrients does a spoonful of tardigrades provide? Would water bear farming be useful or just silly?

"They are never more than 1.5 mm long, and can only be seen with a microscope"

Confused - I can see things that are 1.5mm long. Some sort of editing mistake here, I think.

The average individual is usually 0.3 to 0.5mm, 1.5mm are giants. And though they're described as barrel-shaped, they're not as wide as they're long.

The main problem is they're close to translucent, so bigger individuals can be visible with good vision and the right light, but it's not exactly trivial.

The numbers seem correct...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

"The biggest adults may reach a body length of 1.5 mm (0.059 in), the smallest below 0.1 mm. Newly hatched tardigrades may be smaller than 0.05 mm."

Looks cool, but the page seems to freeze Chrome within a second or two. Chrome could learn a thing or two from Tardigrades.

Put some water on it.

Update: Looks like it fixes itself after a little bit. I'm wondering if Hover Zoom is to blame as it was on in incognito for me but I can't reproduce now so I don't know...

---------------

OS X 10.10

Chrome 41.0.2272.89 (64-bit)

It's happening to me as well. I thought it may be Privacy Badger blocking some JS or something stupid like that but after trying in incognito mode I can confirm it's probably not a plugin causing it (The plugins still being loading in incognito mode are: 1Pass, EditThisCookie, HoverZoom, JsonView, and RES). In Chrome Canary (43.0.2330.4 and 43.0.2331.0 tested) scrolling seems to work fine. It also works fine in FF (34.0.5 and 36.0.1).

Hmm. What OS?

Works for me (Chrome 41.0.2272.89, OS X 10.9.5)

So this is interesting:

    It's not just the harsh environs of outer space that         
    tardigrades can survive in. The little critters seem adept 
    at living in some of the harshest regions of Earth. They
    have been discovered 5546m (18,196ft) up a mountain in the 
    Himalayas, in Japanese hot springs, at the bottom of the 
    ocean and in Antarctica. They can withstand huge amounts  
    of radiation, being heated to 150 °C, and being frozen
    almost to absolute zero.

I'm having a hard time seeing how the ability to survive in such high and low temperatures arose via natural selection, especially the ability to survive at near absolute zero while in the tun state. Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.

> Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.

Doesn't need to arise directly, it may be that the adaptations that allow you to survive -50C are the same ones that allow you to survive -200C.

Also there is Exaptation where one trait for one set of circumstances later adapts to serve another set of circumstances - the classic been feathers, they evolved as a method of keeping warm and later where later co-opted for flight.

This seems the most likely explanation, but it is still extraordinary. Being able to survive in cold is one thing. But being able to survive being placed in liquid nitrogen for an extended period of time? That's incredible.

I dunno, have you looked into the human suspended animation with sulphur? A layperson could say: "wow, it's amazing the humans adapted to go into suspended animation when exposed to the cold and an atmosphere of sulphur!" It's not really something we adapted to, it's just another accident of our biology. https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation

All life is a hack! All organisms are just pushing the minimum code change to get a leg up on everything else. Loopholes are everywhere.

Once you solve the problem of your cells freezing over, I don't think any additional cold is going to be much of a problem. If anything, the colder it is the better off you are due to the slowing of chemical reactions. There's a reason we freeze things to preserve them.

They have been around a while, and the an evolutionary mechanism that lets you survived to -100C (some of the temperature extremes speculated in the last glacial period) might "just work" all the way down to near absolute zero.

That said, I am surprised that no NFL team has picked the Tartigrade has their mascot/theme ("The Texas Tardigrades are victorious!" kinda rolls off the tongue and they the buggers are tough and hang in there, good qualities for a sports franchise)

But the more interesting bit for me, is that they would survive on Mars if there are underground aquifers of liquid water occasionally, and Ganymede or any other moon with liquid seas if the radiation didn't kill them. Which I find interesting that we already have a 'proof of concept' of life that could be living off planet, now we need to figure out if it is actually out there.

As for the "Texas Tardigrades" proposal: the name sounds too much like "retard". Even if the local PC committee did not object, the opposing team supporters would have a field day.

What if the adaption is just a side-effect of another adaptation? As in, if there is no difference between surviving at -80 C and absolute 0?

Besides, I don't exactly see a point in some intelligent creature creating these little buggers with the ability to survive basically anything, yet giving them no other purpose. It's the equivalent of creating a computer program that is in all ways perfect, yet does absolutely nothing.

There is no intended implication for intelligence behind the extremophile behavior of tardigrades. Merely that it is curious how such a characteristic would have arisen given the absence of the environmental conditions (seemingly) needed to precipitate such traits.

Fair enough. I still think that it's not that surprising. For example, nobody in the part of my ancestry that matters evolutionarily had to jump out of the way of a moving car, yet I am able to do this. Perhaps this analogy is too simplistic, but I think you see what I'm driving at.

"but I think you see what I'm driving at."

Hah.

>Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.

Your premise does not justify your conclusion. Reword your final sentence to read: Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen on Earth via environmental pressures, at least not directly.

The less you are made of, the less ways there are to break an important part of you. Complex organisms have many weaknesses.

We can also survive (sort of) open-floor offices and stuff like that, and we haven't evolved that capability.

Have you read the entire article? They propose an explanation for this.

The tardigrade image in the banner at the top is... freaky. Like a Monsters Inc. monster wearing one of those HAZMAT suits they have to wear in case of child contamination.

This is who I think of:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2665/4048198665_d9b03610c4.jpg

Which is Heimlich, the caterpillar, voiced by Joe Ranft.

It made me think that it's already wearing a space suit, no wonder they survive in space.

The mouth(?) is so geometric and symmetrical that it almost looks man-made. I want to plug my headphones into it.

Cryptobiosis (the long-fangled scientific term for what these things do) is something I've been fascinated by ever since I heard about Water Bears on one of those weird little nature shows ten years ago. Most of the organisms that can do it are understandably "simple", but it is truly fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis

I just read that "Tardigrades (water bears) are so tough, they can SURVIVE outer space" and they need WATER from decade to decade to survive and they also live on earth for 500 million years. Then I read "Suddenly, It Seems, Water Is Everywhere in Solar System".

So wouldn't be fun to have a probe (on Philae for example) called "Bearfinder"? Shouldn't our friends live (sleep) in worst case scenario (if earth would be their birthplace) on the moon, mars, or comet 67P. Or best scenario rather everywhere?

This is actually a very interesting idea! We could also seed other planets with our water bears.

Could have potentially disastrous repercussions on alien ecosystems.

Someone could probably spin a great science fiction story around the idea that tardigrades are an advance team for exploration by extraterrestrials.

Or distant relatives of the advanced nanotechnology brought here by aliens who seeded life on this planet.

I was thinking why we don't include these in the mars rovers and other space probes, see how they do on other planets. Is there some ethical problem with that? Like the prime directive.

As far as I know, such missions go to great lengths to ensure this does not happen. There are two main reasons for that: 1) if you're searching for traces of life on another world, you don't want to discover bacteria you brought from Earth, and 2) you definitely don't want to unintentionally contaminate said world with terrestial life that would start to alter the planet, because you'll lose valuable research data.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection.

Data. We can use them to store data. Not your average cat picture storage but maybe DNA data of plant seeds and such.

Well, but how? Tattoo them with a nano-needle?

Or inject them with nano-fibre(?) Use them as a container.

I learned about tardigrades from an episode of last year's remake of Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson said tardigrades survived all five of earth's mass extinctions.

Not only did they survive, massive asteroid impacts could their means of propagation.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425093/earth-ejecta-cou...

In the Bayesian sense, I must now update my priors regarding life coming to Earth from another planet. I always gave that theory a very low probability, but now that its been demonstrated that some life can survive in space, I must admit the theory is somewhat more possible than I previously believed.

Also, does anyone know what "mm" stands for when they say these creatures are a maximum of 1.5mm long? I thought "millimeter" but that doesn't make sense in the context:

"They are never more than 1.5 mm long, and can only be seen with a microscope."

I can see things that are 1 millimeter with my own eyes, so what does "1.5 mm" mean? Could "nm" would have been nanometer, but that would be far too small, much smaller than a virus. I'm thinking they meant millionth of a meter?

Copied from below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

"The biggest adults may reach a body length of 1.5 mm (0.059 in), the smallest below 0.1 mm. Newly hatched tardigrades may be smaller than 0.05 mm."

The are up to 1.5 millimeters long, and any detailed features of the animal can only be seen with a microscope.

some may also like to read about single-cell wasps:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/3...

Thanks for the link but the author, Ed Yong, http://edyong.flavors.me, is wrong. That wasp has probably 10(0) 000's of tiny cells and is as big as some large single-cell creatures.

Can someone explain why something up to 1.5mm long can "can only be seen with a microscope?" That would make sense if the other dimensions were small. But from the pictures, it appears that this is not the case; tardigrades are approximately oval shaped, not much narrower than they are long. I have a circuit board on my desk here where some surface-mount components are about millimeter-something long, and less than a mm wide. I can plainly see them.

The Almighty Wiki says 'Usually, tardigrades are about 0.5 mm (0.020 in) long when they are fully grown'.

Following the reference, we find that they're almost translucent, but can be seen in the right light [1].

1: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2011/5/tardigrad...

They are also transparent, and benefit from a phase sensitive imaging techniques, or dark field.

Some scifi (e.g. Simmons's Hyperion series) posits that the way for humans to survive near-light-speed travel is for the body to be basically destroyed by acceleration, and then rebuilt on arrival. If that ever happens, perhaps tardigrades will inspire the techniques used in the process.

I enjoyed reading it, but Hyperion struck me as having a great many fantasy elements. It has both time travel and FTL (both of which are nonsense given current physics, there is no reasoned framework to explain them in). Also, symbiotic life extension technology.

I also crankily believe that unobtanium is also a fantasy element (sorry Larry, scrith too), so maybe I shouldn't bother having the conversation. But why is a magic wand 'a stupid plot device', but an inexplicable technology is 'a reasoned exploration'?

Or is that not what hard sci fi means? Because fantasy often focuses on the social implications of magic, which is at least a similar sort of activity as imagining how big you can make something if you can adjust the laws of physics.

All valid but the caveat 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. The line between what is science fiction and what is fantasy in a future setting can be very thin.

I'm basically arguing that any such line is arbitrary.

The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is probably a useful one for helping readers find books they like. Going further than that seems like it is going to almost always involve a lot of personal preference.

Describing the modern world to contemporaries of Socrates would be less like sci-fi, more like fantasy, to them.

Or is that not what hard sci fi means?

OK, I removed the adjective "hard". I'm not sure what I was thinking, using such a nebulous term. If you ask nine people the difference between "hard" and "soft" scifi, you'll get ten answers. And the vast excluded middle threatens to dwarf the two complementary categories anyway. I meant merely to differentiate those examples of scifi that go beyond "then they pressed the warp drive button and warped across the galaxy", to consider how humans might travel very fast. In the perhaps poorly chosen example of the Hyperion sequels (if any category would fit them, it's probably "kitchen sink"), bodies were reconstructed by a cruciform "symbiont" that restored recent snapshots. I imagine that instead, whatever cellular processes tardigrades exhibit might be somehow induced in humans.

I was trying not to be tiresome about it, I hope it didn't entirely come across that way.

No worries dude. b^) I got your point. When I saw your comment was gray, I upvoted it.

The difference between hard and soft speculative fiction (science vs fantasy is really more about the setting than the universe structure) is how big the plot holes are in the fabric of the universe.

Why does only one special person have the magical powers? Why do people use their incredible powers only for rather mundane tasks? How is it possible to create that space fortress that has more steel than the all conjectured quantities within 100 light years? The more questions you can ask and file to get good answers for, the softer the fiction is.

If Rahm is to be believed, tardigrades can survive even higher temperatures.

If there is a question about this, one would have expected 90 years to be enough time for someone to arrange a follow-up study.

Water Bears! My daughter is both amazed by and terrified by these.

Tell her that it is her spirit animal. A pretty cool list of features to have for your spirit animal!

Or a Dæmon from His Dark Materials:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_%28His_Dark_Material...

That must be it. Water bears work their way into random conversations with her every once in a while. Narwhals too.

Rotifers support a billion dollar's human industries currently.

They are the preys for breeding the tiny larvae of marine fishes in our future spacial stations so don't go out your planet without some of them.

You don't want just to put some humans in mars. You'll need to move entire reliable trophic chains, and humans are only the cherry at the top. So take with you some rotifers, some Chlorella also and... well, maybe a big bag of dehydrated eggs of desert pupfishes.

What is the chance that these creatures didn't evolve on earth but on some other planet and comet and instead got transported here on a meteor. That would explain a lot of things as to why they evolved to stand 6 times the maximum pressure, temperature colder than ever recorded on earth, and their other attributes which are too extreme for even the most hostile environment on earth.

Are tardigrades conscious?

I don't know if you know this but 'Tardigrades' are the only living beings that survived all the four ice ages. This any many more amazing stories around it can be seen in an amazing TV documentary series 'Cosmos: A space Odyssey' presented by by Neil deGrasse Tyson

As I pointed out way back when,[1] Mark Shuttleworth really missed the opportunity to name an Ubuntu release the Tenacious Tardigrade.

[1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295#comment-403210

There is an educational game, MetaBlast (http://metnet-mbl.gdcb.iastate.edu/), where Tardigrades are creatures you can encounter (and interact with). Even one appearing on the screenshot.

I think they come up in one of Cosmos episodes. Actually very interesting to see how they go around almost everywhere.

Edit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I-PQxuPkjA

Does anybody else feel sorry for them, you look like a turd with legs, your mouth looks like an anus, and you can't die easily. Maybe some sort of reincarnation hell?

That description could apply equally well to a lot of humans who would choose immortality if given the choice. Hell is us.

How do these critters handle bleach?

Who would win in a longevity contest between a Tardigrade and a Rotifer?

I can't stop laughing at the first line of this article "If you go into outer space without protection, you'll die.".

Its like the journalist really took to heart what she learned in her early writing classes about using an attention grabber.

the previous title, "tardigrades, toughest 1mm-long animal on earth" didn't get those page views rolling in...

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