Field notebook
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Animal profile
Microscopic eight-legged invertebrates typically under a millimetre long, with a plump segmented body and claw-tipped legs. Around 1,300 species have been described. Many can enter a dried, suspended state and revive when rewetted.
A tardigrade is not indestructible. Its extraordinary tolerance belongs to the tun, a desiccated barrel-shaped state in which metabolism becomes undetectable. An active, hydrated tardigrade is a fairly ordinary animal that dies from fairly ordinary things.
Tardigrades tolerate vacuum, radiation and extreme cold because those exposures are survived in a dried, metabolically halted state called a tun. Active, hydrated tardigrades are ordinary animals killed by ordinary conditions.
Its famous resilience is not a property of the active animal. A tardigrade withstands extremes only after entering a tun state, losing most of its body water and suspending metabolism, and an active hydrated tardigrade is easy to kill.