Extremely Amazing Animals That Sustain Their Survival Under Extreme Conditions

These slow-moving, microscopic invertebrates (soft bodies) of the phylum Tardigrada are called “water bears”, also known as Tardigrades or moss piglets. They have four body segments and eight legs. They are related to the arthropods (which includes spiders, insects, and crustaceans) and Onychophora (velvet worms), and are usually referred to as a “lesser known taxa” of invertebrates. They are found surviving primarily in water or damp moss.

Photos credit: Willow Gabriel, Goldstein Lab

An European Space Agency (ESA)’s experiment has shown that these invertebrates can survive in the vacuum of space and they are the first animals known to be able to survive the harsh combination of low pressure and intense radiation found in space, and even they’re still found alive with intense pressure, huge doses of radiation, and years of being dried out. In fact, they are the greatest survivors in the nature as they have long been known as the virtual indestructibility animals ever survived on Earth.

Photo credit: Ralph O Schill

Water bears, similar to the picture you see above, were brought to low-Earth orbit in an ESA satellite. With the aim to further test their hardiness, Ingemar Jönsson of Sweden’s Kristianstad University and colleagues launched two species of dried-up Tardigrades from Kazakhstan in September 2007 aboard ESA’s FOTON-M3 mission, which carried a variety of experimental payloads. The satellite then returned to Earth after these water bears were exposed to space for 10 days. They were later retrieved and rehydrated to test how they reacted to the vacuum (airless) conditions in the space, oxygen deprivation, bombardment and other radiations by ultraviolet, the ultraviolet radiation from the sun, and charged particles from the space called cosmic rays as well. The outcome of this test was published in the journal of Current Biology, a year after the launch of this mission. The result tells us that the vacuum has little effect on these creatures, but the ultraviolet radiation which can damage DNA and cellular material did take the toll.