Poetry

Tardigrade

A mascot for resilience

Let your soul be like The tardigrade. Resilient. Amazing. Unique.

This haiku is about some of my favorite little Earthlings, the tardigrades, aka water bears or moss piglets. They’re so ugly they’re cute in my opinion. There are multiple species of tardigrades, all of which are water-dwelling micro-animals which can survive almost anything — extreme temperatures, pressures, radiation, dehydration, and even the vacuum of space. They’re not extremophiles because they didn’t evolve to exploit extreme conditions — they just are completely capable of enduring a wide variety of situations that would be lethal for most other organisms. Plus, one of their natural habitats is within moss (hence one of their common names, the moss piglet), and I adore moss. When I tend the moss in my backyard (and yes, I am weird enough to tend, and even transplant moss in an effort to get it to spread), I like to imagine all the chubby little superheroes roaming free range about my property.

They can be found pretty much anywhere on Earth, including Antarctica, and in addition to moss and lichen, some live in mud volcanoes, hot springs, sand dunes, leaf litter and marine sediments among other habitats. They’re pioneer species in developing habitats and serve as prey for many other creatures. Tardigrades can suspend their metabolism and become nearly completely dehydrated. They can survive in this suspended state for 30 years or more, rehydrate, and then go about their business as if nothing happened.

They’re sometimes tied to theories of panspermia, or the notion that life on Earth could have been seeded accidentally by microbes hitching rides on comets, meteorites or other galactic debris. The concept conversely allows that microbes from Earth could inadvertently contaminate or colonize other worlds. This is one of the concepts that fascinated me back in the days when I thought about a career with NASA studying exobiology. These little squirts are kind of my heroes.

To learn more about them, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade, or this cute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H0E77TdYnY (it’s fun, but wrong about them being extremophiles). A 2016 article from Science Alert discusses the science behind their seeming indestructibility: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-finally-reveals-how-water-bears-have-become-so-damn-indestructible. In an interesting lesson for humans (if they’d ever listen), even these tough organisms might not survive climate change: https://www.sciencealert.com/tardigrades-are-practically-indestructible-but-climate-change-could-be-their-weak-point.

I think the tardigrades are great mascots for our current times, and fodder for parables related to times yet to come. When you feel like you can’t endure all the crazy uncertainty and odd restrictions in your world right now, remember the lowly tardigrades, and channel their spirits.