The wake-up video

It took us a lot of preparation to film the tardigrade tun revival in the water droplet. The video clip below is illustrating how a single (tardigrade inhabited!) moss plant is behaving after being hit by a rain drop. Ca. 10 minutes later the first tardies will crawl away. As we do not want to bore you, the video is accelerated in time-lapse manner, by a factor of 10. The problem with the filming setup is, that the moss plant will tremendously increase in volume due to the water uptake (remember: taking up its fivefold weight in water!). And it is very important to make sure that there is no oxygen shortage in this time period (cold water, subdued light ...) otherwise the tardigrades will not manage to perform their miracle.

Please keep in mind that the tardigrades have no choice in those situations: no one is asking them whether they would like to desiccate at a given moment or not. The tardigrade life will be simply put on ice in those situations and none of the tardigrades can be sure about the future. So, please be aware of the human advantage: mostly safe sleeping and mostly safe awakening without problems!

© 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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