Tardigrades are the only animals that can survive in space
It's no surprise they also look like crazy alien creatures.
Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets or water bears, are an eight-legged, aquatic microscopic animal. With over 1,300 known species, tardigrades are found in diverse habitats across the globe.
While they don’t exactly look like miniature bears (at least not to me), they walk like bears, hence the name water bears.
If anything, tardigrades look like the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.
As weird as these tardigrades look, they are known to be one of the toughest animals in the world. Tardigrades can survive extreme environmental conditions that most animals can’t.
They can survive being frozen to temperatures as cold as absolute zero, and even being dried out at boiling temperatures. They can survive thousands of times as much radiation as we can, and even live at pressures six times of the ocean’s deepest trenches. And they even can go up to 30 years without food or water.
On top of that, they can survive prolong exposure to outer space. They’re freaken crazy aren’t they?
The reason for their crazy survival skills is their ability to enter a state of suspended animation known as cryptobiosis. Triggered by dry environments, tardigrades will squeeze all the water out of their bodies. They’ll then retract their heads and limbs, before rolling up into a tiny ball and becoming dormant.
As they become dormant, they effectively shut down their metabolism while preserving their cellular integrity. In this dormant state, tardigrades can survive for extended periods without food, water, or oxygen, awaiting the return of more favourable conditions.
On top of that, they also have a unique protein in their bodies called Dsup. Dsup, short for damage suppressor, protects their DNA from being harmed by ionizing radiation.
Based on their survival skills, it comes as no surprise that when a sample of dehydrated tardigrades were taken to space in 2007, they some of them survived.
But what’s even crazier, is that in 2019, an Israeli spacecraft crash-landed on the moon that contained a capsule of tardigrades in a cryptobiotic state. This means a bunch of tardigrades have been inadvertently released onto the moon.
While it’s highly unlikely they survived the impact of the crash, I’d like to think there’s a chance that some tardigrades are living on the moon. Aka, we humans inadvertently spawned an alien lifeform on the moon.
I guess that’s one way to ‘discover’ some alien lifeforms in space.
How badass