The Tardigrades Quiz

Who doesn't want to cuddle a water bear.

Pandas with eight legs, but pandas nonetheless. If you squint, perhaps.

Tardigrades are only a half millimeter or so big — which is really quite small, at .02 inches.

Tardigrades live in damp places pretty much everywhere.

Kind of a trick question, as tardigrades can come in a variety of colors — including translucent.

If you want to try to find a tardigrade yourself, wash some moss off and inspect the water with a microscope.

In 1773, a German discovered the chubby things.

They tardigrades moved at a lazy pace, so slow-stepper it was.

Yup, the critters have tiny claws. Not so cuddly now, eh?

There's no larval stage, so they just look like adult tardigrades — but smaller.

Tardigrades even live on Himalayan mountains above 20,000 feet (6,000 meters).

Found at depths below 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), tardigrades don't seem to mind swimming in the deep end.

After being exposed to almost absolute zero temperatures. . .the tardigrades survived.

Basically, tardigrades can get as hot as anything living.

Maybe those other things too, though. No studies so far.

Seriously, the tardigrade is a superhero.

When the tardigrades are tuns from lack of water, they're not quite dead.

While it might not work every time, tardigrades can generally come "back to life" with water.

Within minutes or hours, the once-suspended tardigrade is happily living its best (or at least most recent) life.

The tardigrades orbited 853,000 feet (260 kilometers) above Earth.

Look to their Yelp profiles for reviews.

More than half the tardigrades that went were able to be brought back to life.

While there are only 1,000 species identified, there are suspected to be many times more.

Not just fungus and other tardigrades, but many species eat different things — from plankton to decomposing plant or animal life.

Tardigrades can handle some serious pressure — twice the amount that most bacteria can survive.

Basically, tardigrades don't need to form a tun to protect them from a whole host of stressors — including low oxygen.

Tardigrades were no longer a genetic mystery.

Just kidding, tardigrades were still a genetic mystery.

Perhaps when the tardigrades are in cryptobiosis, their DNA is a bit vulnerable to other DNA.

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