8 Reasons Water Bears Are Too Freaky to Exist

Tardigrades are tiny (and almost cute) animals that have super powers of survival.
8 Reasons Water Bears Are Too Freaky to Exist

The human body kinda sucks. I mean, yes, it's a miracle and an elegant machine and all that stuff. BUT once you alter any of the very specific conditions that allow us to thrive here on Earth, we basically fall apart. It's not just human bodies that are wimps in the grand scheme of things—all animals have similar limitations. Except for one very notable standout. Our planet is home to a teeny tiny animal that puts the rest of us Earth organisms to shame: The water bear.

Tardigrades—a.k.a. "water bears" a.k.a. "moss piglets"—are dainty little eight-legged walking sacks of goo that live literally all over the world (most species are slightly larger than the width of a human hair). While they seem particularly simple in design, they are truly phenomenal creatures. Water bears are—by a long shot—the hardiest creatures in the known universe. They've existed on Earth for millions of years, and will surely continue to exist long after we're gone. In fact, they may even manage to outlive the Earth itself (more on that later).

These tiny things have survived just about any predicament scientists throw their way—being frozen for decades at a time, boiled in alcohol, crushed under extreme pressures, for example. They've even survived for 10 days in outer space. Seriously, John McClane has nothing on these things.

While nature is full of creatures that have survived one particular extreme after the next, tardigrades can survive...everything. Special adaptations allow them to live without water for long periods of time or get pummeled by extreme doses of radiation. But they have one very specialized trick that comes in handy in all sorts of predicaments—they can come back from the dead! Tardigrades can enter a reversible state of cryptobiosis, in which all their biological functions come to a stop until the environment becomes more favorable. They can remain in this state for decades at a time, if not longer.

Click through our slideshow to learn more water bear superpowers.

(Image Credit: Frank Fox / Wikimedia Commons)

  • They Can Withstand Temperatures of Near Absolute Zero

    1 They Can Withstand Temperatures of Near Absolute Zero

    If you took high school physics, you may recall that -459.67° Fahrenheit (-273.15° Celsius) is the lowest temperature possible (a.k.a. "absolute zero"). It's practically impossible for scientists to sustain a laboratory environment of absolute zero, but they can get very, very, very close. A while back, some jerk scientists decided to subject some poor water bears to one of these frigid environments to see what would happen. And now we know that water bears can survive exposure to temperatures of -458° Fahrenheit.

    (Image: LLacertae / Flickr)
  • They Can Survive 30 Years Without Food or Water

    2 They Can Survive 30 Years Without Food or Water

    When I first moved into my new house a few winters back, there was a frozen corpse of a "stink bug" on the outside of one of the windows. It was difficult to reach, and I figured a rain storm would eventually knock the sucker off. So, he just kinda stayed there for a month or two. Then one warm spring day, I watched as this corpse started to reanimate and eventually fly away.

    I thought that bit of natural cryogenics was amazing, but stink bugs have nothing on water bears. Last year, a team of Japanese scientists reported that they had successfully "revived" a group of water bear discovered in Antarctica that had been fully frozen since at least the early 1980s.

    (Image: Rosa Menkman / Flickr)
  • Water Bears Are Everywhere (Seriously, Ev-er-y-where)

    3 Water Bears Are Everywhere (Seriously, Ev-er-y-where)

    There are more than 1,000 known species of tardigrades out in the world. While they are most plentiful in "semiaquatic terrestrial environments" (places where things like moss thrive), they have been found in just about every ecosystem on Earth—mountaintops, in tropical rain forests, and in the Antarctic. At least 150 marine versions of water bears have been found—including in the deep sea.

    (Image: Eden, Janine and Jim / Flickr)
  • They Can Survive in Space

    4 They Can Survive in Space

    Researchers from the ESA confirmed that water bears can survive in space. Think about that. In space. After 10 days exposed to the emptiness of space (complete with the near-total vacuum and extreme radiation), the creatures were successfully re-hydrated and re-animated. Why are they able to do that!?
  • They Have About 18 Percent 'Foreign DNA'

    5 They Have About 18 Percent 'Foreign DNA'

    In 2015, researchers sequenced the first tardigrade genome and found that 17.5 percent of their DNA came from foreign species. Whaaat? It's actually not so uncommon for tiny organisms to adapt the DNA of other species they "consume," to some degree. However, before this discovery, these genetic appropriations were thought to max out at around 10 percent of DNA—and those were in extreme cases. This ability of tardigrades to adapt DNA from other species may be a key to their hardiness.
  • Are Very Good Under Pressure

    6 Are Very Good Under Pressure

    Not only are tardigrades able to survive in the near-vacuum of space, but they can withstand pressures as high as 600 Megapascals, or roughly six times the pressure experienced at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. To put that in some further context, most bacteria and multicellular organisms die at around 300 Megapascals.
  • Scarily Similar

    7 Scarily Similar

    Tardigrades are "eutelic," which means that all adult members of a species have the exact number of cells total. Most species have around 40,000 cells.

    (Image: Goldstein Lab / Flickr)
  • Tardigrades May Be Interplanetary

    8 Tardigrades May Be Interplanetary

    We previously described how tardigrades are able to survive in outer space, which leads to some intriguing possibilities: Consider how Earth is periodically impacted by gigantic space rocks such as the one that took out the dinosaurs. The force of these huge impacts eject tons of Earth rocks into space. If you consider that water bears have been around in some form for millions of years, then many of these rocks certainly brought some tardigrades up there along for the ride. So, there are presumably some tardigrades existing in frozen animation up there in space.

    Let's follow this thought experiment a bit further out: Theoretically, a small fraction of these rocks would eventually impact another planetary body. A fraction of these tardigrades would presumably manage to survive impact. And as long as there was a hint of water on that planetary body, then perhaps it's possible that a few of these hardy travelers could eke out an existence. They could be all over the solar system. It's an intriguing thought anyway.

    (Image: Willow Gabriel, Goldstein Lab / Wikimedia Commons)