Tardigrades are better than you

We’re everywhere.

You can barely see us, if you can see us at all, but we’re there. In moss, on the bottom of a lake or, thanks to you, even in space.
Freeze us to -200°C, heat us up to 148°C, boil us in alcohol, poison us with radiation, try to destroy us with pressure or throw us in the vacuum of space.

We won’t die.

We’re called the water bears, the space bears, the moss piglets. We’re the Tardigrades – the slow steppers. But don’t think that those unimpressive names mean anything to us. We will probably outlive you.

Stories that are fairytales to you are normal for us. Snow White was thrown into a death like state by a poisoned apple – we can do it at will. And we don’t require a kiss from a stranger, a droplet of water is enough to wake us from our slumber.
You humans use so many things to try and prolong your life. You drink and eat antioxidants, hoping it will stop your aging. Fools! We produce them ourselves.

You freeze some of your dead, because you think you might revive them one day. But while they’re ripped apart by ice crystals on a cellular level, we just roll into a ball and wait till it gets warmer again. Even our eggs can survive frozen for 30 years!

And we are many, oh so many. Not just in number but also in variation, over 900 of us, while you still argue about the color of your skin! So much variation, it’s incredible. Some of us reproduce by having sex, some reproduce asexually. Some of us only eat other really small animals. If we weren’t so tiny, we would probably have replaced you by now!

So the next time you refer to yourself as the crown of creation, just remember that we have been here before the T-Rex walked the earth and compared to us, you’re more fragile than a snowflake.

Read more about tardigrades here:
https://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/tardigrade/index.html
https://www.livescience.com/57985-tardigrade-facts.html
http://gizmodo.com/genes-hold-the-key-to-the-water-bears-indestructibility-1786814698
http://mentalfloss.com/article/71380/7-tough-facts-about-tardigrades

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