A Florarctus tardigrade from Croatia (III)

Well, this is issue #140. When will this come to an end? We are dealing with a small niche topic - and sometimes it appears that it is difficult to find new stuff. And we must admit that in case of the sea water aquarium we would sometimes like to broaden the scope. When searching for tardigrades in sea water (and believe us, you need time for searching!) you will come across many other interesting findings. Even the salt water itself is an interesting object. Just have a look at this:

Just a tiny splash of sear water, dried on an object slide - a micro cemetary in the micro aquarium? No, just beautiful crystals.

You will come across many bizarre "neighbours" when screening your petri dishes for tardigrades. Sometimes you even will have difficulties to decide whether you are facing the front or hind end of those strange beings. And many of them will not be able to arouse as much sympathy as the tardigrades are able to. Possibly the hotel managers close to the examined beaches therefore might not really appreciate our findings though virtually all of them are harmless. Look at his one, for example:

Frankly speaking, we do not know what it is exactly. So we simply fall back into 18th century biological terminology and call it a worm. No eyes? Is this actually the front end? Its body length is about 1 mm.

Mediaeval illustrators might have enjoyed those micro organisms. It is really a pity that they had no microscopes in those early times. So they didn't come across all those tiny real monsters and therefore had to invent them. The tiny Florarctus tardigrade with its transparent veil appears to be unique in the kingdom of the animals:

Floractus sp. tardigrade from Croatia. Body length below 0.2 mm.

And it looks even more fantastic under darkfield illumination.

Floractus sp. tardigrade. Ventral view. Body length below 0.2 mm. Dark field view. Note the face with the "hat" and "eyes". It does look like some sort of fairy tale king, doesn't it?

After those general remarks we might look a little bit closer at the Florarctus anatomy. At higher magnification we are even able to follow the course of the nerve lines into the head region:

The read arrows are indicating nerve links to the sensory instruments in the head region of the Florarctus tardigrade.

© Text, images and video clips by  Martin Mach  (webmaster@baertierchen.de).
Water Bear web base is a licensed and revised version of the German language monthly magazine  Bärtierchen-Journal . Style and grammar amendments by native speakers are warmly welcomed.

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