This critter is amazing! What's That About?
What you’re looking at is not a steampunk deep sea diving suit. It’s a tardigrade. It’s a living critter; about a millimetre long. That means that that industrial looking snout; might be a snout, maybe a mouth, or an ear - for all I know, the litter bugger could be facing the other way and that thing might be the other end of the alimentary canal - I don’t know! What I do know, is that snout (or whatever it is), that appears to be so precise, is really freaking small. Like really freaking small, and it does something! And this is a living entity. It has legs (8 of ‘em) and digits hanging off those legs. And the whole thing is only 1 millimetre long. (And is that micro acne on the feet/hands(?!?) and headish/bummish thingie?) Our little tardigrade is not only living, it’s outlandishly tough. To get a good picture of just how tough this thing is, think of the toughest critters you’ve ever heard of; even those little shrimps that live in scalding hot acid on the ocean floors where the volcanic gasses erupt, and know that this critter would jauntily laugh, Har! Har! at their luxurious abode. Anyway you can read all about these radiation, outer space, resistant critters, in short below, or at length here. What I’m getting at is just how amazing, awesome and mind boggling this existence of ours is. I’m not using those superlatives in some social media way, like the comments about some attention seeker on Youtube who disqualifies himself from fatherhood while failing to pull off some trick involving his skateboard and a stair rail. I’m talking about those things that stop the train of thought between stations; aspects of reality that leave the witness of them lost for words:
I’ve yet to find a synthetically generated colour that can’t already be found in this existence of ours - let’s call it nature - in a flower, in a feather, on a dancing spider, a bug’s back or belly, a lizard’s head or a snake’s tail, an iridescent cloud, even rocks in the ground (not to mention the aquatic creatures and the wondrous bioluminescence).
the crisp air of a clear winter dawn, on your cheek as the creeping sunlight steals, one by one, the stars from your eyes; and the varied voices of the birds, singing up the sun, form into a somehow coordinated chorus; or the warmth of a summer’s desert evening as the last light fades to reveal a dark sky night that no synthetic light show could hope to out-sparkle,
a breath of the liquid air of a tropical forest, flavoured with the tastes of all the different plants that surround you in every direction, as your eyes are taken prisoner by the dancing butterflies who's sparkling wings subordinate your attention,
a walk through a gorge in the Flinders Ranges where each step is a step backward or forward through millions of years of earth’s history, while an emu and his chicks meander about in the ‘here and now’ as they forage along the banks of the creek,
this device in front of you... Freakin’ amazing confluence of energy, matter and human intelligence and the considered application of each, that delivers at your every eager request, whatever you want; information, entertainment, connection with most of the people on this planet; access to their ideas and of course the risk of their malice. All in a moment - phew!!
that thing between the ears; just there, behind the eyes; that makes whatever sense it makes of everything that is fed into it via the eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue and that ineffable awareness that just clicks on the vibe of things. How blessed and cursed are we by this thing?! Makes that device in front of you look like an abacus, regardless of what the gung-ho geeks say.
All these existential items and more; so far out of the grasp of our understanding and yet the very stuff of our daily experience and existence, drive us to pretend we understand.
Too big, too beautiful to authentically hold within our knowledge, we crumble into hubris… ...and claim success, claim potency, claim dominance, and we run home and put on the telly or complain about the speed of the download of a cute kitten leaping unsuccessfully at the crazy kid as he face-plants the concrete, having landed on the part of his disrespected body that separates his legs, and then doubles up and swears at the concrete, the handrail and the skateboard to the chorus of derisive laughter from his mates off screen. And all the time this innocuous little tardigrade and all its buddies are out there, able to withstand a harshness so unimaginable that it’s safer to be amazed by a dill on a screen than risk being devoured by the awe-fullness of our everyday, everywhere environment. I love this planet. I scored the image and the accompanying description, below, from NASA’s APOD site. (Well worth a regular dive into, I reckon.) Tardigrade in Moss Image Credit & Copyright: Nicole Ottawa & Oliver Meckes / Eye of Science / Science Source Images Explanation: Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That's because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA and reduce their body water content to a few percent. Some of these miniature water-bears almost became extraterrestrials recently when they were launched toward to the Martian moon Phobos on board the Russian mission Fobos-Grunt, but stayed terrestrial when a rocket failed and the capsule remained in Earth orbit. Tardigrades are more common than humans across most of the Earth. Pictured here in a color-enhanced electron micrograph, a millimeter-long tardigrade crawls on moss.