Have you ever imagine to live forever and stay in this world for the future? Have you ever why couldn’t human beings to live forever? In my opinion, except the using technology such as change you to a robot or cloning. But do you know that there is a specie is able to live forever and considered a kind of animal able to live in the space without any support and may not die ideally. And this kind of animal I am talking about is called tardigrade, which is commonly called water bear, because of the shape of it is like a bear. It is called as the toughest animal in this world.
Water bear is a tiny creature that lives almost everywhere in this world. No matter inside the volcanoes, under the sea, or in the ice, they are able to survive. The first reason that they are able to live under different extreme environments is because of the ability of changing forms of water in to a compound called trehalose. According to the National institution of health, “trehalose is visualized as a storage molecule, aiding the release of glucose for carrying out cellular functions”. And this compound only exist inside the living creatures that is lower but higher life forms. This allows them to obtain the water bears in a good situation that may survive in extreme places without water.
The second advantage of a water bear is the minimum size of them. A single adult water bear is about only 1.5 mm. Additionally, they live under the sea or in extreme environments, that cause them hard to be found by the predators. For an animal that is able to survive, a weapon is a necessity for animals to attack other species. Even the water bears are very small, but the can’t look down by their ability of attacking. The one weapon is their sharp teeth, according observations, they are able to use their teeth to attack small animals and stab into them.
The one reason that tardigrade is very tough and no other animal may even imagine is the survival under the environment in the space. A experiment is conducted by Swedish researcher K. Ingemar Jonsson, he launched an space craft on to the space with the dry water bears, after they are back to the earth, after living under the open space condition facing the harsh environment with no oxygen and UV-radiations, they still survived.
By having these awesome abilities, they don’t really need to worry about the death and they will ideally live “forever”. Many may think how long have they lived on this world, or is it living longer than human. According to an article in New York Times, the scientist are trying to do researches on the evolution and trying to find the fossil of this creature, but it is hard to discover the fossil of this tiny animals and hard to determine the truth of this species. In general, there are still little to be known about this small creature. But in my opinions, this small animals that have such strong abilities to survive may evolve for longer period of time than human, or they may be the master of this world since along time ago. And because of this tiny creature’s survival abilities, it may be hard for them to even form a fossil and if there are, the tiny fossil may already be hide under ground and hard to be discovered by human beings. Human beings are researching about how to live in the space for a long period of time. After we found out the ability of a creature is able to survive in the space, I think it is possible to have inventions that help humans to survive in more harsh environments by conducting more research.