Wow! This crazy creature just returned from the dead after 30 years encased in ice

[mfcorey1]

The itty bitty water bears were lying in some frozen moss when a team of Japanese researchers discovered them on a trip to the Antarctic back in 1983. But rather than warming up the creatures, called tardigrades, the scientists locked them in a box of ice, shipped them back to Japan and stuck them in a lab for more than thirty years.

The nerve.

No matter, though. It takes more than a few decades stored at subzero temperatures (-20º C, to be exact) in order to knock out a tardigrade. So, just one day after a separate team finally pulled the microorganisms out of their frozen cell in 2014, poking them with pipettes and soaking them in a nice nutrient bath, one of them started wiggling its legs.

Before long, the tardigrade — which the researchers named “Sleeping Beauty 1″ was scampering around its petri dish, even laying eggs. Meanwhile, a second tardigrade (“Sleeping Beauty 2″ began to revive, while an egg that had been found alongside them started to hatch, the scientists reported this week in the journal Cryobiology.

Dig ’em up, freeze ’em, abandon ’em for a generation — tardigrades can take it all. The cockroach wishes it was this sturdy.

These indestructible creatures — known as “water bears” but more closely resembling a cross between a caterpillar, a hippopotamus and Jabba the Hut — are the latest darlings of the biology world. They’re so adored that a group of University of North Carolina researchers launched an International Society of Tardigrade Hunters last year to seek out new species of tardigrade and promote appreciation of them among the general public, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York built a 10-foot replica of one to float above an exhibit on nature’s most resilient creatures.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/this-crazy-creature-just-returned-from-the-dead-after-30-years-encased-in-ice/ar-BBpEJMW?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

[hobbit709]

1. Tardigrades make cockroaches look like like amateurs at survival.

[haikugal]

2. Space travelers...nt

[Crunchy Frog]

3. Whatever we end up doing to this planet

The tardigrades will survive.

That makes me happy.

[hfojvt]

4. "Nothing can stop this thing

we've hit it with everything we've got"

They are far too small to be stomped on. Let's hope the antibodies take them out.

[Travis_0004]

5. I find it interesting that they can survive colder temperatures than any other organism.

And they can also survive hotter temperatures than any other other organism.

[NickB79]

6. Stuff a few hundred pounds of algae spores and tardigrades into a Mars probe and launch that sucker

In a few decades, Mars will be teeming with life