Croatia (I)

What is your personal method to decide about a holiday location? Do you choose among glossy catalogue photographs? Thinking about specific leisure time activities? Are you in urgent need for local shopping activities? Looking out for more serious cultural programmes and historic sites? Or are you - possibly - looking out for a place where you might come across a tardigrade?

Don't worry. With respect to tardigrades there needn't be a family conflict: tardigrade inhabited regions are abundant and in fact it might turn out as difficult to find a region without any tardigrade. You can choose dramatic locations like an Ocean abyss or the Antarctica. But, with respect to tardigrades, "softer" regions, like e.g. the Kiel Bay in Northern Germany will offer nice tardigrade habitats, too.

A few years ago, most of our colleagues and friends appeared to make holiday in Croatia. So, why not do the same? Obviously, with respect to those maritime and marine tardigrades, we preferred a place close to the Mediterranean Sea and decided to go to the island of Losinj. You will find the exact location when copy-pasting the following coordinates into Google Maps:

44.523334, 14.457836

A picturesque, turquoise bay with crystal clear water, immorally close to a comfortable hotel.

View in direction NNW, as seen from the Hotel Aurora, Mali Losinj, Croatia.

Our favourite diving area is depicted on the image below, directly below the person with the red T-shirt. At a depth of about 3.5 m there were several small lacunae filled with a rather coarse sand and clean shell debris. As already described in previous issues our favourite and most successful collection method is the use of a small plastic film container (you will remember, from the analogue photography period) in order to collect some of this seemingly inorganic material and this was all we did.

Bay in front of the Hotel Aurora, Mali Losinj. View in Eastern direction showing our favourite diving area.

After the usual hours of search by means of the dissecting microscope we came across our first Croatian tardigrade, a species which has not yet been described in our magazine. On the following photograph it is shaking its head in a rather typical, vivid manner. Two claws on each leg, so obviously a youngster.

First tardigrade finding from Croatia! Body length ca. 0.1 mm.

Go on reading in our next issue.

© 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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