This issue of the   Water Bear web base    is shorter than the previous ones. But there is really no reason to get nervous about this. It will take some more years until the topic will be really finished.
I just would like to draw your interest towards a special attraction. You will not happen to come across it somewhere else, neither in the Louvre nor in the British 'National Gallery' nor in the Munich 'Alte Pinakothek'. But as a faithful and tough reader of the    Water Bear web base    you will get it delivered electronically and without costs directly to your home! I just had to place it on a page of its own, as its colours do not harmonize with the green background of the text pages.
Please be patient, you will have to load about 100 k, but you will see that it is really worth while. You won't find something similar on the web.

Voilà! Here it is ...

Please allow some comments. Historical colour representations of water bears are really rare, in particular those with a water bear in the visual center of gravity. The image dates back to the year 1867. The original dimensions are 15,3 cm x 9,6 cm. The tardigrade measures only about 3 cm in length.
Nevertheless its vivid character has been represented very well by the artist. You see, as a rough guess, only about 40% of the water bear species really deserve the scientific term Tardigrada  (i.e. "slow-walkers"). In fact many water bears species are much more lively than our own species Homo telespectans  (i.e. "human television looker").
The tardigrade shown on the picture might belong to the species Ramazzottius oberhaeuseri,  previosly called  Hypsibius oberhaeuseri .
Perhaps I should remark for the female readers that the species has been named in order to honour the famous italian tardigrade scientist Giuseppe Ramazzotti and not the italian singer with a very similar name.
The picture bears the signature of the lithographic workshop "Atelier A. Schütze" from Berlin. In spite of the minute representation an excellent print quality has been achieved which reveals also minor water bear details like the claws, the pigment distribution, the buccal apparatus and the eyes.
In case you should be not familiar with the other animals on the picture you might have a look at the index of the internet microscopy magazine Micscape. Just look out for the keyword "pond". See you in April.

© 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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