A water bear ... the most strange creature in all environments

Ahmed El-Deeb

Not a single drop of water is almost devoid of life, as there are viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoan mono cells, as well as whole universes that the eyes of human beings are unable to observe, but they are filled with beings of what is admired.

The most unusual creature
Perhaps no more strange creature lives in these aquatic universes than that microscopic animal called water bear, which may actually resemble a bear or a pig (from its other names algae pig).

But if you have seen Alice’s drawings and films in Wonderland and you see that caterpillar sitting on mushroom smokes smoking a hookah, you have seen the closest things similar to water bear, but the water bear that lives with us is in fact more surprising - incomparably - than all Something Alice saw in Wonderland!

Until the time the results of the study, which was recently published in the Scientific Reports, were not known, science did not know a way to eliminate these creatures whose length is barely one millimeter!

There are more than a thousand known species of water bears, most of the water bodies settle from the depths of the oceans to the arid glaciers of Antarctica, and from the snow capped at the top of a mountain extending clouds to a handful of algae growing on moisture that struck a tree trunk in a tropical forest.

Bears are waving water with its lean, heavyweight pool - for which it has acquired its other more famous name, Tardigrades, which means in Latin the slow step - in waters under impossible conditions for the vast majority of the planet's creatures.

Scientists record its survival in a massive spectrum of temperatures starting from two hundred degrees below zero and reaching 150 degrees Celsius, and pressure equivalent to six times the pressure at the deepest known point in the ocean floor, and levels of radiation of thousands of times the doses of humans and most forms of life! But in outer space, within the range of cosmic rays and the absence of oxygen completely, according to an experiment conducted in 2007!

The secret of strength and weakness
But how can water bears endure such impossible conditions? Scientists answer that the secret of these supernatural powers is due to the ability of water bears to enter a lethargic phase - and perhaps even closer to death - when testing for drought or other unfavorable conditions.

Where the little creature hides around it to form a barrel-like body, and its vital activities drop to close to 0.01% of its normal levels, and stay in that barrel state until the water returns, even if enough of it is only to cover the little body.

Conditions are moderate, for years and possibly decades, and in an amazing experiment, water bears were returned to normal after remaining in the barrel state inside a dry specimen of algae in a museum for more than a hundred years!

There is no doubt that these imaginative capabilities have prompted scientists to seek to understand more about the mechanisms of water bears' survival, by exposing them to the harshest possible conditions and studying their responses. This led to the discovery of the weak point of these legendary little creatures, which is the exposure to the high temperature for extended periods, in the Scientific Reports mentioned in this study.

"We showed the water bears in their normal states to 37.1 ° C for a continuous period, so half of the respondents died after 24 hours. As for the barrel phases, the same percentage was at 63.1 ° C," said Ricardo Nevis, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen who participated in the study. Previous studies in which the water bears tolerated 150 degrees Celsius subjected them to this high temperature for only half an hour.

Thus we discovered that these creatures that we had thought until recently were supernatural, the threat of their survival would require only a rise in the temperature of the planet only a few degrees Celsius, which does not seem quite far in the horizon of this earth in which the imminent extinctions of various types of beings, even those that have reached Stories adapted for the amount of myths.