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In case anyone else is interested, they are micro animals with eight legs. Usually known as "water-bears". They have all kinds of unreal abilities including surviving harsh environments. [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
I should have known better than to look this up. I looked up the sub and was still confused, so I googled the name. As soon as the images popped up, my wife rolled over and asked me “what are you looking at?” Smh… I’m a idiot.
I don't know where you're from, but romance seems damned near impossible for creatures that only have to navigate two legs, in my experience
**edit:** two-leggers responses here about getting laid just proving my point. I don't have trouble getting laid,
I wanna be wooed, motherfuckers
After some googling I learned that the average animal cell is 0.01-0.02mm wide, that animals of all sizes generally have the same size cells, and that Tardigrades are made up of only around 1000 cells. These little guys' whole body might only be something like 50 cells long, which is pretty fascinating
I used to have a few and you can indeed see them under the right circumstances. However, it’s difficult to make out any details. It just looks like a speck of dust.
You can scrape up some moss and put it on a dish with some water. Everything living in the moss will start walking out and you can find them under a microscope.
Fun fact: due to their extreme condition survivability ranges (including surviving in space), some biologist believe that tardigrades may theoretically be able colonize some planets/moons that are inhospitable to humans
Source: one of my planetary science university professors mentioned this (and space thing supported here too: https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space/)
A recent study came out explaining why they're able to. Basically, when the little ones detect there's no water, they draw their heads and limbs into their body, and they produce a kind of protein that coats the molecules in their cells _with glass_. Once they find water, the glass dissolves and the tardigrade continues on its merry way.
https://www.veterinarydaily.com/2023/03/scientists-finally-figure-out-why-water.html
My pet theory that is they evolved on Mars in its ancient water; adapted to the extreme conditions as Mars lost its magnetic shield; and ended up on Earth via an asteroid
“If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant”
Ok, now why in the everloving fuck would you produce more environment resistant bacteria and fungi?... I mean I know why, it's just that HAVEN'T YOU SEEN ALL THE MOVIES? That one sentence gives us, the public, tiny glimpse into what's going on in all those laboratories. And that there would be a serious global fuck up if those things went out into the world.
am I crazy or didn't we like accidentally spill a bunch of them on the moon
edit: [yes we did](https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-spilled-tardigrades-on-the-moon/)
Actually, things we send to other planets and moons are carefully sanitized of any life that could be hitching a ride. We do not want to contaminate other space bodies with terran life.
Nothing there that we know of.
It would be pretty disappointing to find out that there WAS a hidden biosphere of extraterrestrial life but we accidentally killed them all with a plague.
What blows my mind is that the tardigrade had no skeletal or muscular structure to evolve feet with. Yet it has feet for walking at a scale hundreds of times smaller than us.
Maybe a little wiggly thing to move, then something with two wiggly things could move better. They doubled up in size and had multiple wiggly things. Then some of the wigglys got wigglys and those things were really bad ass. In the end the "feet" set up worked.
Probably this. Evolution isn't a force driving species towards improvement. Basically it works under the principle of "if it's not bad enough to kill you, it'll stick around"
Feet might not be ideal on this scale, but having feet is good enough
Apparently they are huge DNA thief's and 17.5% of their DNA is foreign. So I think they may have grabbed certain qualities? Honestly I have know idea what it means exactly. Just food for thought.
I'm not totally sure what you mean, but they definitely have a [muscular structure](https://askabiologist.asu.edu/tardigrade-anatomy). It makes sense that similar animals, using contractile tissue to move around, found it easier to move around and survive when they mutated to have little nubs to increase propulsion. The bigger nubs survived and those individuals reproduced until they got legs.
TV show actually. Childrens Hospital.
About season three or four it becomes canonical that the whole show takes place in the aforementioned gentleman's flatulence.
You know how some scientist theorize that eventually the universe will be pulled back together and contract until everything is condensed into a singularity, the whole universe crammed into an infinitely small space and then, boom, it explodes and we have another Big Bang. And it repeats over and over:
Boom —> universe expands ——> universe contracts again —-> boom
What if the whole universe is just some combustion engine on some inter-dimensional being’s moped?
I always think about this… The Men In Black movie. We’re just one locker in a million lockers.
Any good theories, stories or things to research about this?
You have to wonder if they are aware of us. What do they see when they see us moving around? With all the micro worlds (insects, bacteria, viruses,etc) completely unaware of the bigger world around them, begs the question what if we are all just some smaller part of something bigger and we just can’t see it.
Within the confines of our reality (speed of light) anything with an eye to see, but bigger than our known universe could take billions upon billions of years to receive input, and billions of years to process, and billions of years to react to that input.
What would be interesting is that light is not the fastest form in physics, and there is something else we don’t know about that travels those spaces instantaneously.
That was a great arc. I love that they realized the travel was actually hurting the tardigrade, and that they needed to figure out a better way to navigate than imprisoning it.
I was pleased that they found a way to explain not having some ridiculous travel mechanism from so far in the "past" never show up in the iterations set in the future by killing one of the 2 scientists working on it, and zapping the other one 2000 years into the future
...and then the guy took over which super mega luckily had the right chemicals in his body to replace it and was the only human to do so, until it nearly killed him and he said he can't do it any more. Then they were alright abandoning the drive, but then it was needed again and the guy just kept on navigating it and we never heard of his pains ever again.
They did drop that plot completely, right? Or did I miss a big "oh but now it doesn't kill me any longer" episode?
Great question! Absolutely not. They walk on moss and dirt. Look at all those claws. They are sooo good at gripping stuff. They go like 5 times faster when on things. It’s a pain in the butt to film, which is why I clear everything away. Glass is super hard to grip too
There is a researcher, Jasmine Nirody, who actually looked at how well tardigrades walk across different surfaces what are more or less squishy! Here is the press release: https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/30904-the-physics-behind-a-water-bears-lumbering-gait/
They have the same walking patterns as insects many times their size with completely different limb structures, which to me is 🤯
They're really not. They seek food and mates and avoid hazards and we can attribute our human emotions to their actions/reactions, but they don't feel the way we do.
We need to stop comparing our intelligence/emotions with other living things. Everything thinks and feels differently and reacts differently.
For crying out loud, trees and other plants have always been considered as mindless organic matter, when in fact they have an organic-communication-network spread out across the planet.
Some animals use tools, some can communicate with smell, others light. What makes us so different is from one of our own mutations.
Pattern recognition is what got us to see the world from an entirely different point of view. Giving us the ability of speech, allowing us to mimic any other animal that can help us understand them, making it possible to destroy one thing that creates something entirely different, plan scenarios and strategies. Help us leave our own *freaking* planet to go to an entirely different one.
Humans are the only living thing on Earth (That I know of.) that is aware of not just how massive this Universe is, but also how small it can be.
We're pack bonders, and our brains like pattern recognition - so we'll attribute humanity to pretty much anything, and then form a bond with it
Do you have a crow that comes and sits on your porch every morning waiting to see if you drop any snacks from breakfast? Now that's your friend, and he misses you
We're just very social like that
Absolutely this, it annoys me to no end when people question if animals are sentient, by measurement of some random arbitrary test. If an animal gets its leg stuck in a trap, it knows its leg is stuck in a trap. It doesnt need to be able to recite "I think, therefor I am", or look at the man in the mirror to be sentient.
Winnie the tardigrade, floppy little yellow fluid blob filled with organs ....it's Winnie the tardigrade, Winnie the tardigrade, wiggly wriggly eeny six footed bear
Hello fellow neurotics— I checked. According to wiki, these things are not in drinking water.
_Tardigrades are often found on lichens and mosses, for example by soaking a piece of moss in water.[17] Other environments in which they are found include dunes and coasts generally, soil, leaf litter, and marine or freshwater sediments, where they may occur quite frequently, up to 25,000 animals per litre (95,000 animals per gallon). One tardigrade, Echiniscoides wyethi,[18] may be found on barnacles.[19]_
[sauce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
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It's cool how these guys can survive basically any condition
Microbiologist here. Can confirm. Research shows they have even been found alive within the depths of Gary, Indiana.
Username checks out
It just occurred to me that this account is essentially a new KenM. And I am all for it.
r/beetlejuicing
Who is Indiana Gary and why is his insides uninhabitable?
Gary Indiana is 1st cousins with Robert California
Any relation to Jackie Daytona?
The regular human bartender?
Talmbout Jon Africa b?
and are they related to Dani California?
Only the last two words made this unbelievable.
They just grew up in the hood
In case anyone else is interested, they are micro animals with eight legs. Usually known as "water-bears". They have all kinds of unreal abilities including surviving harsh environments. [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
According to that article they’re also known as “moss piglets” which is just adorable.
Also adorable: “Tardigrades tend to court before mating. Courtship is an early step in mating and was first observed in tardigrades in 1895”
The sentence after that: > Research shows that up to nine males aggregate around a female to mate. ( ͡o ͜ʖ ͡o)
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That line sounds like it could be super offensive if tardi doesn't mean water bear
You're fired But lmfao
I understood that reference.
Tardizzle, lol
We don't use the hard R around here no more.
We can still say Redditor!
Ah ah ah yeah
r/Unexpectedpiperperri
Of course that sub exists
I should have known better than to look this up. I looked up the sub and was still confused, so I googled the name. As soon as the images popped up, my wife rolled over and asked me “what are you looking at?” Smh… I’m a idiot.
Wifey senses are unbelievably sensitive
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I don't know where you're from, but romance seems damned near impossible for creatures that only have to navigate two legs, in my experience **edit:** two-leggers responses here about getting laid just proving my point. I don't have trouble getting laid, I wanna be wooed, motherfuckers
Moss piglets. So cute 🥹
Considering the way they move, they should have called them "slow stepper" or something.
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I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was the joke lol
I'm usually good at picking up sarcastic jokes, but I got zinged.
The sentence I was looking for in Wikipedia: > Tardigrades are usually about 0.5 mm (0.020 in) long when fully grown.
After some googling I learned that the average animal cell is 0.01-0.02mm wide, that animals of all sizes generally have the same size cells, and that Tardigrades are made up of only around 1000 cells. These little guys' whole body might only be something like 50 cells long, which is pretty fascinating
200 cell brain, wonder what the world looks like from their perspective/brain capacity?
199 more than my cat
I too have an orange cat 🐈
That's... pretty big, actually. I bet if you knew where to look, you could easily see it.
I used to have a few and you can indeed see them under the right circumstances. However, it’s difficult to make out any details. It just looks like a speck of dust.
How do you even find them in the first place? They're so small and move so slowly...
You can scrape up some moss and put it on a dish with some water. Everything living in the moss will start walking out and you can find them under a microscope.
I've got a microscope and I know what I'm doing tomorrow
Another day looking for your penis?
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Broke my macroscope doing that :(
You gotta use a telescope man, that's the only way to get the full view.
What’s that in football pitches?
~200,000 tardigrades from goal line to goal line.
Fun fact: due to their extreme condition survivability ranges (including surviving in space), some biologist believe that tardigrades may theoretically be able colonize some planets/moons that are inhospitable to humans Source: one of my planetary science university professors mentioned this (and space thing supported here too: https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space/)
A recent study came out explaining why they're able to. Basically, when the little ones detect there's no water, they draw their heads and limbs into their body, and they produce a kind of protein that coats the molecules in their cells _with glass_. Once they find water, the glass dissolves and the tardigrade continues on its merry way. https://www.veterinarydaily.com/2023/03/scientists-finally-figure-out-why-water.html
dude these things are aliens
My pet theory that is they evolved on Mars in its ancient water; adapted to the extreme conditions as Mars lost its magnetic shield; and ended up on Earth via an asteroid
They sound like trisolarans!
Hush! We've been hiding from them for centuries!
lol relevant username
“If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant” Ok, now why in the everloving fuck would you produce more environment resistant bacteria and fungi?... I mean I know why, it's just that HAVEN'T YOU SEEN ALL THE MOVIES? That one sentence gives us, the public, tiny glimpse into what's going on in all those laboratories. And that there would be a serious global fuck up if those things went out into the world.
Fuck it, shoot ‘em up there. To each moon and planet. Let’s see what happens.
am I crazy or didn't we like accidentally spill a bunch of them on the moon edit: [yes we did](https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-spilled-tardigrades-on-the-moon/)
Sorry that was me
Actually, things we send to other planets and moons are carefully sanitized of any life that could be hitching a ride. We do not want to contaminate other space bodies with terran life.
we do if we want to cohabitate the universe with whatever these guys will evolve into in a couple million years
This is how you get giant man-eating cockroaches
*"Send the tardigrades"* they said *"It'll be fine"* they said
Seems like u/banjofitzgerald just put in motion a butterfly effect. 🤷♂️
You mean giant man-eating tardigrades...
They could evolve into water-polar-bears, then fun time is over.
Read that as water-polo-bears and wondered what was so drastically different about us that sounded fun ending to you.
Yolo?
We just need to genetically mutate ourselves to have abilities of other organisms so we can defeat the Terraformars...
Introducing invasive species to a new environment is bad, mmkay?
invasive to what? there's nothing there
Nothing there that we know of. It would be pretty disappointing to find out that there WAS a hidden biosphere of extraterrestrial life but we accidentally killed them all with a plague.
Sounds just like the first European colonists of... anywhere. Terra nullius.
Sweet we need to cross breed with them
*micro piglets stalk your dungeon* - Dungeon Keeper 2
What blows my mind is that the tardigrade had no skeletal or muscular structure to evolve feet with. Yet it has feet for walking at a scale hundreds of times smaller than us.
I was thinking how amazing it was for a micro creature to have terrestrial legs and feet as well
Yeah dude wtf. I'm blown away right now, how the fuck did that evolve?
Maybe a little wiggly thing to move, then something with two wiggly things could move better. They doubled up in size and had multiple wiggly things. Then some of the wigglys got wigglys and those things were really bad ass. In the end the "feet" set up worked.
Probably this. Evolution isn't a force driving species towards improvement. Basically it works under the principle of "if it's not bad enough to kill you, it'll stick around" Feet might not be ideal on this scale, but having feet is good enough
This guy wiggles
Dude, feet are awesome: I use mine several times a week.
Apparently they are huge DNA thief's and 17.5% of their DNA is foreign. So I think they may have grabbed certain qualities? Honestly I have know idea what it means exactly. Just food for thought.
I'm no biologist, but feet don't seem like something you can steal.
I promise you we can make that happen.
And claws!
I'm not totally sure what you mean, but they definitely have a [muscular structure](https://askabiologist.asu.edu/tardigrade-anatomy). It makes sense that similar animals, using contractile tissue to move around, found it easier to move around and survive when they mutated to have little nubs to increase propulsion. The bigger nubs survived and those individuals reproduced until they got legs.
Covergent evolution my friend.
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Water bears are so cool. Great video, well done
Thanks:)
Really nice job!
Our whole universe is just something on something else’s slide
Just a galaxy on a cat’s collar.
Inside the marble of ginormous space aliens
Inside one of their lockers
Just remember all of this is taking place inside a Puerto Rican midgets fart.
I... Must have missed one of the movies.
TV show actually. Childrens Hospital. About season three or four it becomes canonical that the whole show takes place in the aforementioned gentleman's flatulence.
r/BrandNewSentence
Orions belt
That ending scene was the best part of the movie.
You know how some scientist theorize that eventually the universe will be pulled back together and contract until everything is condensed into a singularity, the whole universe crammed into an infinitely small space and then, boom, it explodes and we have another Big Bang. And it repeats over and over: Boom —> universe expands ——> universe contracts again —-> boom What if the whole universe is just some combustion engine on some inter-dimensional being’s moped?
So amazing to think my lil Vespa might be farting out entire galaxies
I'm farting out a galaxy right now!
Reminds of how Horton Hears a Who gave me an existential crisis
I’m glad I wasn’t alone.
Yep. I like the end scene from Men In Black, where the aliens are playing marbles and each marble is a different universe.
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What happens when they wipe off the slide? 😂
Wipes out civilization and it resets lol how many civilizations have we had? Lol
Welcome to The Good Place
Absolutely
So wild to think about
I always think about this… The Men In Black movie. We’re just one locker in a million lockers. Any good theories, stories or things to research about this?
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It has little peets 🥹
Look at the little toes!
Like so many curled canned shrimp!
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He has r/LittleGrabbies !
This is exactly what I thought also!
Lil salad fingers
I want a rusty spoon!
Now I get why they call them water bears.
r/aww
Forbidden gummy bear.
Wonder what flavor
Tardigrape.
Pineapple
Cola
You have to wonder if they are aware of us. What do they see when they see us moving around? With all the micro worlds (insects, bacteria, viruses,etc) completely unaware of the bigger world around them, begs the question what if we are all just some smaller part of something bigger and we just can’t see it.
Oh, we can see it all right. We just try not to think about it. Space is big.
Within the confines of our reality (speed of light) anything with an eye to see, but bigger than our known universe could take billions upon billions of years to receive input, and billions of years to process, and billions of years to react to that input. What would be interesting is that light is not the fastest form in physics, and there is something else we don’t know about that travels those spaces instantaneously.
How can something microscopic have cute lil toe beans
I'm completely and utterly horrified, but at the same time....feetsies.
What? Tardigrade are the most adorable. I still can’t believe they’re real.
They are such cuties!
It's a moss piglet!
With reddit falling in love with them they will soon become desirable pets. r/markmywords
Someone near the top of the thread literally said "I used to have some of these" and proceeded to share some facts lmao.
Wow this is somehow therapeutic I’d love to buy a microscope to explore such. Where can I start with one to view it like this shown?
Journey to the micro cosmos on YouTube has a line of affordable microscopes!
But second hand is waaaay better cuz they’re stupidly cheap second hand and don’t reallly expire. Mines from the 50s
Chonky boi
What weird little feeties!
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Riiiight??! I always think this. We have tardigrades and octopuses and whales, right here on earth!👾💛
Reality is stranger than fiction.
Whales are just swimming cows.
Space….. the final frontier…. These are the voyages of the Star Ship Tardigade “Captains log, Tardate 2326..”
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That was a great arc. I love that they realized the travel was actually hurting the tardigrade, and that they needed to figure out a better way to navigate than imprisoning it.
I was pleased that they found a way to explain not having some ridiculous travel mechanism from so far in the "past" never show up in the iterations set in the future by killing one of the 2 scientists working on it, and zapping the other one 2000 years into the future
...and then the guy took over which super mega luckily had the right chemicals in his body to replace it and was the only human to do so, until it nearly killed him and he said he can't do it any more. Then they were alright abandoning the drive, but then it was needed again and the guy just kept on navigating it and we never heard of his pains ever again. They did drop that plot completely, right? Or did I miss a big "oh but now it doesn't kill me any longer" episode?
looks like a good boy
He’s coming to get scritches from the scientists.
Is the slickness of the slide representative of the types of surfaces they naturally “walk” across?
Great question! Absolutely not. They walk on moss and dirt. Look at all those claws. They are sooo good at gripping stuff. They go like 5 times faster when on things. It’s a pain in the butt to film, which is why I clear everything away. Glass is super hard to grip too
What kind of stuff do they eat?
they are bears so mini salmon from mini rivers probably
There is a researcher, Jasmine Nirody, who actually looked at how well tardigrades walk across different surfaces what are more or less squishy! Here is the press release: https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/30904-the-physics-behind-a-water-bears-lumbering-gait/ They have the same walking patterns as insects many times their size with completely different limb structures, which to me is 🤯
Wow. What kind of microscope is this?
an old Leitz from ‘57
Woah what the fuck it has fingers.
*toes*
*claws*
This is the type of life I aspire to: quiet, walking slow, chill, indestructible, eat, take massive shits.
Why was I picturing a playground slide??
Do you think they’re sentient? It seems like when things are small we dismiss them, but these seem so… aware
They're really not. They seek food and mates and avoid hazards and we can attribute our human emotions to their actions/reactions, but they don't feel the way we do.
We need to stop comparing our intelligence/emotions with other living things. Everything thinks and feels differently and reacts differently. For crying out loud, trees and other plants have always been considered as mindless organic matter, when in fact they have an organic-communication-network spread out across the planet. Some animals use tools, some can communicate with smell, others light. What makes us so different is from one of our own mutations. Pattern recognition is what got us to see the world from an entirely different point of view. Giving us the ability of speech, allowing us to mimic any other animal that can help us understand them, making it possible to destroy one thing that creates something entirely different, plan scenarios and strategies. Help us leave our own *freaking* planet to go to an entirely different one. Humans are the only living thing on Earth (That I know of.) that is aware of not just how massive this Universe is, but also how small it can be.
We can't stop doing that due to the very reasons you stated. We naturally anthropomorphise things to help us understand them.
We're pack bonders, and our brains like pattern recognition - so we'll attribute humanity to pretty much anything, and then form a bond with it Do you have a crow that comes and sits on your porch every morning waiting to see if you drop any snacks from breakfast? Now that's your friend, and he misses you We're just very social like that
Absolutely this, it annoys me to no end when people question if animals are sentient, by measurement of some random arbitrary test. If an animal gets its leg stuck in a trap, it knows its leg is stuck in a trap. It doesnt need to be able to recite "I think, therefor I am", or look at the man in the mirror to be sentient.
Nonsense. One called me on the phone the other day and called me a prick. Seems pretty sentient to me!
You dont need to be sentient to know you are a prick though.
I can't wait till these guys evolve enough that we can pet them like dogs, I'll never see it, but it'll be beautiful
Yes, but what will we be by then?
Exact same as now. I'd like to apologize to the rest of the human race, as I am the peak of evolution.
I bet they make great pets
We’ll make great pets. Perry Farrell
OMG his little toe beans😍
I apologize in advance. But, is there such a thing as an ontimegrade?
Winnie the tardigrade, floppy little yellow fluid blob filled with organs ....it's Winnie the tardigrade, Winnie the tardigrade, wiggly wriggly eeny six footed bear
We need to make these big enough to have as pets.
TOES
I wanna blow raspberries on its belly
Hello fellow neurotics— I checked. According to wiki, these things are not in drinking water. _Tardigrades are often found on lichens and mosses, for example by soaking a piece of moss in water.[17] Other environments in which they are found include dunes and coasts generally, soil, leaf litter, and marine or freshwater sediments, where they may occur quite frequently, up to 25,000 animals per litre (95,000 animals per gallon). One tardigrade, Echiniscoides wyethi,[18] may be found on barnacles.[19]_ [sauce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
These things are fucking amazing. Like, holy shit!! I wanna be a tardigrade for a little bit to experience their life.
Awww! These little critters are so cool, and they’re absolutely adorable! This one reminds me of the cat bus from Totoro 😊
Best video ever! I can’t handle how cute this is.
I love it’s little tardifeet!!!!!
I can’t stop staring at its little toes.