Why should we send dry aquatic invertebrates into space, an environment that certainly is not normal for these animals?...One would be: to see if these animals, as the first ever, are able to cope with the extremely dry conditions of deep vacuum and the harmful solar and galactic radiation up there. In the past, several biologists have suggested that tardigrades may be one of the few animals that have a chance to come back alive after a trip in real space. Finally we will be able to find out if this is true....At a more mechanistic biological level, exposure of organisms to space conditions will reveal how living cells react to the potentially very stressful impact of space parameters. And organisms that can handle the damaging space parameters will be important sources of knowledge for how to generate the space ecosystems that will be necessary for the more permanent human establishments in space that is envisaged today.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
In September last year, a team of scientists launched a squad of tiny animals into space aboard a Russian satellite. Once in orbit, the creatures were shunted into ventilated containers that exposed them to the vacuum of space. In this final frontier, they had no air and they were subjected to…
Don't let their small size fool you. Tardigrades, or 'water bears', are really tough animals. According to a review published in the American Scientist, these microscopic invertebrates can survive extreme variations in temperature from near absolute zero (-459 deg F) up to +302 deg F. They can…
Bdelloid rotifers are one of the strangest of all animals. Uniquely, these small, freshwater invertebrates reproduce entirely asexually and have avoided sex for some 80 million years. At any point of their life cycle, they can be completely dried out and live happily in a dormant state before being…
Water bears, aka tardigrades, are resilient little creatures. These microscopic animals can survive both freezing and boiling temperatures, radiation, high pressure, starvation, the vacuum of space and even desiccation. This last ability caught the attention of a team of researchers interested in…
Good luck little water bears! I hope some of you escape and seed distant planets.
See this video of what a tardigrade might look like once it returns from space (alone) and starts eating people.
http://brainew.com/e/ezboard.cgi/db=alife_debate&action=read&dbf=200312…
hey im a student at highschool, dooing a research project with water bears. i was wondering the best place to get them, or if i can by chance get them from ur guyses project. please contact me at darkmike333@aol.com
Tardigrades can be recovered from lichens and mosses in your local backyard forest, Mike. Sampling protocols are described here at the Illinois Wesleyan University website below. The site lets you get involved in a larger tardigrade distribution study, if you want.
You'll need to use a microscope from school, of course. Let us know how the project turns out, OK? It's a great idea.
http://www.iwu.edu/~tardisdp/sdp_protocols.html
Yeah, just so you know - they survived