In 1933, the owner of a New York City speakeasy and three cronies embarked on a rather unoriginal scheme to make a quick couple grand: Take out three life insurance policies on the bar’s deepest alcoholic, Mike Malloy, then kill him. First, they pumped him full of ungodly amounts of liquor. When that didn’t work, they poisoned the hooch. Mike didn’t mind. Then came the sandwiches of rotten sardines and broken glass and metal shavings. Mike reportedly loved them. Next they dropped him in the snow and poured cold water on him. It didn’t faze Mike. Then they ran him over with a cab, which only broke his arm. The conspirators finally succeeded when they boozed Mike up, ran a tube down his throat, and pumped him full of carbon monoxide. They don’t come much tougher than Mike the Durable, as he is remembered. Except in the microscopic world beneath our feet, where there lives what is perhaps the toughest creature on Earth: the tardigrade. Also known as the water bear (because it looks like an adorable little many-legged bear), this exceedingly tiny critter has an incredible resistance to just about everything. Go ahead and boil it, freeze it, irradiate it, and toss it into the vacuum of space — it won’t die. If it were big enough to eat a glass sandwich, it probably could survive that too. The water bear’s trick is something called cryptobiosis, in which it brings its metabolic processes nearly to a halt. In this state it can dehydrate to 3 percent of its normal water content in what is called desiccation, becoming a husk of its former self. But just add water and the tardigrade roars back to life like Mike the Durable emerging from a bender and continues trudging along, puncturing algae and other organisms with a mouthpart called a stylet and sucking out the nutrients. “They are probably the most extreme survivors that we know of among animals,” said biologist Bob Goldstein of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “People talk about cockroaches surviving anything. I think long after the cockroaches would be killed we’d still have dried water bears that could be rehydrated and be alive.” This hibernation of sorts isn’t happening for a single season, like a true bear (tardigrades are invertebrates). As far as scientists can tell, water bears can be dried out for at least a decade and still revivify, only to find their clothes are suddenly out of style. Mike the Durable did just fine in the freezing cold, but the temperatures the water bear endures in cryptobiosis defy belief. It can survive in a lab environment of just 1 degree kelvin. That’s an astonishing -458 degrees Fahrenheit, where matter goes bizarro, with gases becoming liquids and liquids becoming solids. At this temperature the movements of the normally frenzied atoms inside the water bear come almost to a standstill, yet the creature endures. And that’s all the more incredible when you consider that the water bear indeed has a brain, a relatively simple one, sure, but a brain that somehow emerges from this unscathed.
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