INVERTEBRATE OF THE WEEK

வணக்கம் and welcome to the very first installment of "Invertebrate of the Week" at the Blaft blog--a weekly celebration of spinelessness in all its myriad forms.

Our first invertebrate is the Tardigrade. Check this one out: Cute, eh?

But before you start with the cootchie-coo baby talk, take note: these microscopic eight-legged guys are just about the toughest living things on the planet.

Scientists apparently like to do experiments on them to see how hard they are to kill. They can survive being frozen at 0.05 degrees Kelvin (that's really, really close to absolute zero). They can survive being boiled at 150 degrees Celsius. They live at the north pole and at the equator, in the Himalayas, and 4000 meters under the ocean. They can survive 1000 times the amount of radiation that would kill a human. They can even live in the vacuum of space--the only known animals to be able to do so. (Some bacteria and algae can survive in a space vacuum too, but they don't count as animals.)

The way they survive all this stuff is by using "cryptobiosis", which basically means they stop all metabolic processes. In other words, they can die and then come back to life. Like zombies.

The fact that tardigrades can survive and reproduce after exposure to unfiltered solar radiation in a vacuum--which damages DNA--means that they probably have some way of repairing their own genetic material.

Moral: Don't mess with tardigrades, because they are unbelievably awesome.