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Oh hey, it's the sunglasses that you sat on, but you still wear crooked ali wort with a really big episode on a little creature. Let's get into it with a warning that this episode is an instant classic. I'm warning you you're going to listen to it more than once because it's so good and it's perfect prepare. So what is the tartar grade? You're about to find out more about these water bearer moss piglet tiny creatures with extreme survival abilities via the loving eyes of an expert
Tartar gridologist who also identifies as a biophilist. Simply loves nature, loves critters, and is up to their eyes in wonder Their bio literally says to me, every life form, no matter how gruesome, think tapeworms, flukes, and the corpse flower of borneo is beautiful and awe inspiring. Oh, you're going to love them. So they got their bachelors and zoology in Southern Illinois, a master's in zoology at the University of the West Indies, and a biology PhD at UC
Santa Cruz. They are currently a professor at Warren Wilson College. They have discovered many new species of tartar grade and is one of the foremost tartar gradologists on Earth. Just ps tartar gradeology. It's very much a field. It's an actual term, and you should know that tartar grade means slow stepper, just a tardi grader. They're tiny, they are rotund, and they saunter in no hurry. We're going to get to them swiftly, but first a head's up to back
to schoolers. We launched a new show a few months back on its own feed. Smologies used to be in this feed, but we gave it its own home, so you can look fir Asmologies wherever you get podcasts, or check the link in the show notes. Subscribe to that one too, in case you have littles and you need kid friendly versions of Ologies Classics that are classroom and
all ages safe. Also, thank you to patrons at patreon dot com slash Ologies for submitting your questions and supporting the show for as little as a dollar a month. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmarch dot com. We have backpacks and college sweaters and toads and hats and such. Also, thank you for leaving reviews for zero dollars. Thank you
to everyone who does. I read them all, including this just left one from Ivacnaird, who wrote, you make it interesting regardless of subject, it is all interesting and we just didn't know until you showed us. Oh. I have a lot of gratitude for that. And thank you for all the reviews anyone who's left one. They held this
show so much. And here we go into the episode Saunter, into a microscopic wonderland of weird business about mystery maps that last longer than you can imagine, how a loaf of a critter can deal with a vacuum of space, how to find and marvel at Tartar grades, the experiments involving their survival Moon landings, cryptobiosis, biodiversity, kitten claws, knife mouths, their sexual prowess aka the tntra grade, life splicing their DNA into ours, spiders on Mars, flimflam, and so much more.
With a Creature of Wonder, Professor Zoologist and your new friend and confirmed tartar gradologist, doctor Paul Bartles.
I always am ready to talk about tartar grains. Paul Bartles, he doctor tartigrade.
Do a lot of people in your life casually, like your neighbors and stuff. Do they know what you study? Or are you just like, oh, Paul, the cool guy that lives next door.
Yeah, a lot of them do. I'm the tartar grade guy.
When do you remember seeing your first tartar grade? I've never seen one in person, But do you remember when you saw yours?
That's a good question. I mean I saw pictures of them in my zoology class in college, but I never saw a live one. I don't think I ever saw a live one. I don't think I was a successful finding them until I actually worked with somebody who helped me learn how to collect them and study them, and so I would have been around the year two thousand when I started studying them myself. You're kind of elusive if you don't know the tricks.
Yeah. Oh, that's a huge question on my mind is how do you find them? I guess first I should ask you to describe two people. What is a tartar grade. Some people will know this word and get thrilled, and some people will be like, do I skip this episode? What even is it?
Going to love this?
What is it?
Tarti grades are microscopic animals. They're complex, multicelled, but microscopic animals, and they are in their own pilum. The kingdom an Amalia is divided into about thirty or so phila. They're their own phylum about four teen hundred species, and their characteristics are that they have five body segments, four pairs of little stubby legs, and they have a cuticle that they have to mold when they grow, like nematodes and
arthropods because they're related to them. And they have these paired stylets that are like little hypodermic needles that they can poke out their mouths. And so that's the general characteristic of tarte grades. And the thing that they're famous for is being champion animal survivors. That's probably what people know about them, if they know about tartar grades.
Fourteen hundred species. If you would have asked me, I would have thought, oh, you know how, there's maybe eight species of bear. There's like a lower number than you would think.
And probably why you think that is because on the internet, the meme for tartar grades is this one image that's everywhere, and it is one species, and so you kind of think, oh, well, it's they all look like that.
So you may have seen an electron microscopy portrait of what appears to be an inflated leaping bag with small baguettes for legs and a barbed wire vape pen for a mouth, or perhaps you saw an animation based on that photo and it looked like a flying chod with eight stumpy appendages and a garbage disposal for a face, And perhaps you feel grateful that they are microscopic, but.
In fact that meme is not a great meme. All we can talk about that if you want, Oh, yeah, brother.
Why is that not a representative of the tartar grad family. And also I wonder if that one particular tartar grade that's scanning electron microscope image. If that Tartar Grade knows how famous it is, like that is the most famous microscopic animal on the planet. What is that image? It looks like it has a hell mouth. It looks like it has the poato sarlac as of mouth. And one patron described it as like a floating baked potato with legs.
They look like floppy baked potatoes, quoth patron Megan Walker. But it is that image. Where did it come from?
That is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it, because that image is everywhere on the internet. It drives me nuts because it's so wrong. In fact, I'll show you. I've got a little toy here. Oh it's a little night light. Everybody needs one of these.
Oh it's lovely Tarti grade nightlight.
And another little Tartar Grade squeeze toy for anxiety. We all need those, yes, in this day and age. But they all look exactly like that, right, This is what they all look like.
Yep, modeled after that famous internet imagery that.
Is so wrong. It is so messed up. It is so messed up. My kids would say it's fed up. I wouldn't say that on the air, but you know they weren't raised, right. But yeah, So this image, the one I'm thinking of, is a animated image. They took that scanny electron microscope image and they made an animated image out of it with computer generated graphic, and it shows this happy little tartar grade swimming along in the water.
It's kind of bright pink, and it's got this mouth that's poking out and then alternately sucking back in, forming like this giant anus head thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, is that what you're talking about? Yep, yep, ye, yep, that's that's what these that's what these little toys showed, the anus hit.
Yep, yep.
It's disgusting.
Is that not what they look like?
It's disgusting. No, that's not what they look like.
Really, wow, what are their faces usually doing?
So that image, let me count the ways it's messed up. Okay. First of all, they're not pink. They're not pink.
Okay.
I think somebody thought most piglet, which is one of their common names, and thought, well, if it's pig lit, I guess it's pink. But it's not that kind of tartar Grade is usually white or clearish. Sometimes some darker pigments, but never pink. They don't swim, oh, they're been thick. Tartar grades crawl on the bottom, and so if you drop the tartar grade in the water, it would flail its legs helplessly and fall to the bottom. And the claws are all wrong on those images.
So the popular animation depicts them with kitten claws at the tips of each michelin man leg And.
This is the way you can tell if it's an anatomically correct image. Okay, So on tartar grades, they have four pairs of legs. The first three pairs of legs are all oriented the same. The fourth pair of legs comes out the very rear of the body and is oddly turned around at one hundred and eighty degrees relative to the first three. Those computer generated images are never right about that. That's the way to check. Yeah, And the worst thing is that mouth thing. So they do
not live. Animals don't. Their heads don't cave in to form an anus head. They just don't do that. They have this cuticle that's kind of continuous around their head and body, and so that's relatively rigid. There's a lot of move going on in the mouth, but that's internal. You don't see it in the head.
How did we get it so wrong?
I think what happened is that those scanning electron microscope images that you are talking about, they're so beautiful, and they're also everywhere on the internet. Some of those show the head normally, some of them the heads contracted. That's an artifact of preparation for scanning electron microscopy, and so I think the animators saw both of those images and just thought, well, okay, if it's moving around, it must alternate between those two. That's my conjecture of how that
got to be like that. I'm sorry, that's just wrong. But the head of Tarte Grays is nicely, smoothly round or maybe tapered forward. It never caves in like that. The internal mouthparts are beautiful. They have a mouth, They have a bugle tube that's kind of like ar esophagus. It ends in a punching bag like pharynx, and then that goes into a stomach and intestine. Pharynx has muscles attached and it's going like this all the time, going in and out to form suction like the bulb of
an eye dropper. The silts are poking in and out all the time. All that stuff's going on in sort of beautifully complex motion, but it's all inside the animal.
You don't see that unreal.
So another reason I hate that image is because people that look at it and say, oh, well, there must just be this one kind. Yes, but there's several different kinds of tartar grades. They come in several flavors, and there's a lot of diversity among the individual species. And so that one image is the image that almost always gets displayed. But it's not. I don't even think it's
the coolest one. The best ones. The best ones in like pop culture would be if you ask me, I, do have you seen ant Man in WASP?
No, I haven't seen it. There's tartar grades in it.
Oh, there's tartar grades in both the ant Man movies. And in the first one it's a cameo appearance. In the second one they have a really major role. They almost eat Michael Douglas. It's very scary. In case they don't make it.
I don't say that.
I can't lose you too.
I love you, hope. So did they do it right?
Yeah? And the tartar grade scene in ant Man and the Loss, the second one, they're the other kind of tartar grade. They're not like the one that's all over the internet, and they're actually very well done, except for the fact that they're swimming. But at least they don't have an anocent.
Do they call up tartar gridologists and say, hey, how can we make sure that we do this right?
They must have, because at least in that show they did, because those are really well done. So they must have talked to somebody I don't know who.
Next time, give you a holler, give you a jingle, yeah, invite you to the premiere. Also, can you describe also their scale? Are they all super super tiny or do they vary in size?
They do very in size, but in a very small size range. We say they're microscopic. And so what we mean by that you have to think small. You have to think about a small size scale. So think about the foot long ruler you had in grade school. Flip it over to the metric side. It's divided into thirty centimeters, and then each of those is divided into the tiny little marks. Those are the millimeters. One millimeter is about the size of the period at the end of a sentence.
You read this all the time in my crossy stuff, and I actually measured it's true period. It's about the size of one millimeter. The largest tartar grades can get to be about one millimeter in length, the size of that period. But those are the tous you know, tous like rodents of unusual size.
Tartar grades of unusual size.
Yes, I actually use that in a research paper. It's been published.
That's amazing. I fact check this and the man is not lying. You can see his twenty nineteen Zoological Journal of the Linae and Society paper Altitudinal Gradients and Body Size and Marine tartar Grade, which contains the sentence quote. We did not find a significant increase in maximum body size with latitude. Therefore this is not responsible for body size,
latitudinal gradients and marine tartargrades. But we examined our database to find out whether there are polar tartigrades of unusual size touss with our apologies to the princess bride end quote. This is how you publish papers, folks.
Yes, those are the tartar grades of unusual size. So for a period at the end of sins you can see it with your naked eye. Of course, right the largest tartar grades could be seen with the naked eye, but you wouldn't even know they're a tartar grade. They're just a spec magnify them to study them. And there are a whole lot of tartar grades that are much
smaller than that. So at the other end of the size scale, the tiny end of the tartar grade size scale, we have to have another unit of measure that's smaller. So if you take that millimeter or that period at the end of sens and you divide it a thousand times, one of those units asand of a millimeter is a micrometer or micron. The smallest adult Charte grades that I've measured are between thirty five and forty microns. And to put that into perspective, that's about half the width of
a human hair. Oh tiny, and you can't see that with your naked eye. Teeny tiny. Here's another thing to think about about life at small size scales. We have this huge gap in our biodiversity knowledge, and it's the gap between the number of known species currently and the total species that are on earth, including all those You have to be discovered. That gap is called the Linnaean shortfall after Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth century naturalists who came
up with our system of classification we still use. So one end of that gap, that huge gap between the number known and the number not known, is the number of known species. So you want to take a guess at that, how many known species there currently are? How many described?
Oh? Man, because there's I know, there's like three hundred thousand of just beetles or something, right, but they're really four thousand mammals.
So yeah, yeah, you're a bunkers, you know this.
No, I would guess like half a million.
There's almost a million insects species.
Oh my god. Okay, as a bug lover, a million bugs thrills me. But what about all the species ever on earth combined?
According to the IUCN, which is the group that keeps track of endangered species, they say we're a little bit over two million named species right now. But that's a guess. And it's a guess because not all museum collections are digitized, and if they are, they don't all talk to one another. The databases don't talk to one another, so it's a big bioinformatics problem, and we're always describing new species, so it's a moving target. But we'll just go with two
million for now. And so at the other end of the continuum is the total number of species, including all those you have to be discovered. So if we don't know how many we know, we certainly don't know how many we don't know. Guesses on that range really widely. But to make a long story short, one estimate you see a lot is nine million total species on Earth. So that's the line in shortfall. Two million known, nine million unknown. Both of those numbers are huge guesses, but
it's clear we have a giant line in shortfall. There's a lot of life we don't know. The larger the species, the more we already know, the fewer there are yet to be discovered. And at the other end, when we look at the microscopic range, especially, the reverse is true. The fewer we know now and there are vast numbers yet to be described. So life is mostly small, and all those microbes and all those tiny little plants and animals literally run the world. So I'm glad we're doing
this episode. Maybe it'll open door for other episodes about microscopic organisms, because that tiny, tiny little world's huge.
For more on this, you can look into our biology episode on Moss, which is excellent with Braiding Sweetgrass author doctor Robin Wall Kimmerer. We also have a plenaria episode with doctor one Pegahan and other teeny critters that we're going to link in the show notes. Did you start loving science from that tiny level or did you start with like I love cheetahs and charismatic megafauna, and then get smaller and smaller? Like what was your entry point?
Let's see, I got interested in biology through water. I was one of those water rat kids, and somehow, growing up in southern Illinois about as far away from the ocean as you can possibly get, I got infatuated with oceans and scuba diving. And I think the scuba diving part was because of an old TV show called Sea Hunt.
Oh I've heard of it.
Yes, Lloyd Bridges played Mike Nelson, and every week there was another daring do underwater and so cool. What's the matter with you? You want to sit out here in this raft all night? No, but we might have to, well not if you do something. So anyway, I got interested in my first love in biology was marine biology and coral Reefy College, and on coral reefs, the dominant
animals are invertebrates, so I immediately started studying invertebrates. And then I learned about tartar grades when I took my first zoology course and thought they were cool. I now call them charismatic microfauna. I love that, you know, cute and cuddley and champion animal survivors. What's not to love. But I didn't start studying them until about the year two thousand. I would teach my classes about them, but
we never could find them. And around the year two thousand, I was looking for new research directions, and I was looking for things that would attract undergraduate research interests because that's who I supervise and research stuff. And I heard about the All Taxibiodiversity Inventory, the ATBI that was starting up in the Smokeyes Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which is just an hour drive from Warren Wilson College, and I knew they were looking for p able to study
unstudied groups. I knew tartar grades were one of those groups. I also knew that I was not a taxonomic expert on tartar grades. But the part biologists were able to put me in touch with Diane Nelson, who is a professor at East Tennessee State University, and so she became my mentor in tartar grade ology and we still are great friends and we continue to collaborate. With Diane's help and with the whole army of Warren Wilson students, we did a large scale inventory in the Smokies.
By large scale, he means large.
Scale, and it ended up taking ten years. It was one of the largest inventories of tartar grades ever done, and it was really successful at giving my students dozens and dozens of research projects. We took the number of known tartar grades in the park from zero to eighty five, including twenty five new to science.
Nice nice work.
Wow.
We published a ton of papers and I finally developed some expertise with that group of animals. And you know, at least now I can find them.
I can't wait to get to tips. I should ask first when it comes to what tartar grades are doing in the universe, because they do run the world. What are they eating, what are they pooping? Where are they living? You said that they're benthic. Do they live in completely aquatic environments or do they live as they're called moss piglets or water bears. Are they in the moss? Are they in the water? Do the fourteen hundred species live in different places?
They live in different places. They all live in moist sediments basically, even if they're temporarily moist, So they live in ocean sediments both deep and shallow and on the beach. They live in aquatic sediments like in freshwater habitats, streams and ponds, and especially they're really abundant in the periphytin.
It's the green scus that grows on rocks and plants in ponds, And they occur in temporarily moist areas like moss and lichens and soil, the grid on your gut, or anything that's got something for them to hide in and is at least temporarily moist, and they do all kinds of things. There are some that are carnivores that are eating other microscopic animals in their world. There are some that are herbivores that are eating algae or sometimes
the moss tissue that they live in. There are some that are detritivores or microbivores sucking up the substrate, and there's some that are omnivores, and you can sometimes tell that from their mouthparts. Those with really robust mouthparts are predators. Those with really thin light mouthparts are probably herbivores. And those that have like a vacuum hose for mouthparts can bend their mouth down and kind of suck up the bottom. Those are the detritivors. And you can sometimes do gut
contents analysis. You can look at them through the microscope, and for example, you can see when a predator's been eating other animals. You can see the hard parts of those animals in their guts.
Take a moment, if you will, to a map X ray vision into your guts right now. Mine would be stale granola and yeah, a tin of smoked oysters. Also, for more on seeing into your own guts, please enjoy the radiology episode on X ray vision. And we also have a microbiology episode on how your own zoo of bowel animals affects your vibe. Also, I have a field trip episode about a kolonoscopy prep. So you're welcome. Don't turn your nose up. You're going to need one one day,
speaking of do they have eyes or noses? How are they finding their prey?
That is a great question. Some tartar grades have eye spots, some don't. We know that at least some of them are negatively phototactic. They can move away from light, and so they probably probably most tartar grades have eyes. But here's the cool thing about this. So the ones that have eyes have these some of them have big, dark eyes and they're very cute looking. So we always were thinking, well, what are the pigments in these eyes? You know, we
still don't know what the pigments are. But a student in Germany, a PhD student in Germany just a couple of years ago, published this cool paper where she was looking at the ultrastructure of eyes and what she found was that and we always knew that the eyes, the pigments were actually on the brain itself, it was part of the brain. So what she found was that, yeah, that's true, but those pigment eye spots are not innervated.
What does that mean.
There's no nerves running from them to the brain, and underneath them are two different kinds of light sensor cells that we know from other invertebrate animals that are the light sensors. So it raises the question, well, what are the pigments for. What are they doing with those things over their eyes? It's like wearing sunglasses. Why do you bother having eyes if you're going to put sunglasses. I guess, I mean, I don't really know. She had an idea.
We know they go away from light. Well, her thought was that maybe it's creating shades so that the light gets shaded when it comes from one side, so that they can tell which site it's coming from, which I thought was a really cool idea.
Well, what about their brains? You mentioned them, so they do have little tiny brains. How big is their brains? What are they doing with them?
They have?
They have a fair sized brain and average sized brain for a tiny you know, when you scale down their body size, they have an average sized brain for a invertebrate animal. Their sensory depending on the species, they have various sensors coming in from the head and from some other as a body sometimes, and so they're responding to those.
They're responding to light. They're helping them orient their sensing smells, like males can orient to females based on the smell, They're running their mouth parts and their muscles, you know, So it's doing all the stuff that brains do.
How are they reproducing? I didn't even think about that. They seem just so gender neutral in the images that I can think of. But how are they finding each other? Are they having litters to the hafteny tiny nipples? What's going on?
Okay, So there are fourteen hundred species, so there's some diversity in their reproduction. And there's one species that I know of that's hermaphroditic and probably self fertile, we think, but we don't really know.
Yes.
According to the twenty fourteen study titled Spermatozoa in the Reproductive System of a hermaphroditic marine, tartar grade or Zealiscus belopus O. Belopus is a simultaneous hermaphrodite and suggests that the reproductive mode includes copulation and cross fertilization, which means it's got both bits, but it still likes to get
it on with others. Also fun side note. The species was first described by Eveline du Bois Raymond Marcus, who was a German zoologist and artist who moved to Brazil at the rise of Nazism because her husband, another zoologist, was Jewish, so they've fled the country. She co wrote a lot of his papers, but if she got credit, then he wouldn't get paid, so she was kind of like on the DL, really good at her job. Also, you should know that there are three main flavors of
tartar grades. There are the U tartar grades, which are primarily freshwater bound. They are the heterotardeic grades, whose genies have their own prenal gonopore instead of using the butthole like the Utarta gratta. And then there are a third kind. These are what Paul calls the Yeti of the water bearer world. Do they exist? They are mezo tarta grades, which, if you ask our pal Workipedia, mezzo Tarta grade is represented by a single species known from a single specimen
found in a hot spring in Nagasaki, Japan. And that one single specimen is now lost. Go back to the location check for more. We can't because the location from which that specimen was collected has since been destroyed by an earthquake, so its reproductive anatomy has not been studied recently. Did it ever exist or was the person who found it just mislabeling a different one that was already described. If we build a time machine, can we go hot tub and look forward again? How many are out there
that humans haven't found? And we'll never find mysteries abound?
Let's get sexy, and then at least half, maybe most of the rest of them have separate sexes and reproduce sexually. So males and females reproduce sexually. And then there's some other ones that we've never found males, and we know that the females can produce all daughter offspring, and so they're reproducing asexually, but we also know they can switch
between those things. And there was a Japanese researcher had a culture of asexually reproducing species going for generations, all females, and all of a sudden the male popped up and they made it. So they probably can go back and forth at least occasionally. And some species males are almost equal to them females, so there's a variation in sex ratio and this whole switch between a sexuality and sexuality.
So yes, females tend to be more numerous than males, and even in some populations that pomp out bibiz with no males, a male might pop up. Now, other species of tarte grades have co ed existences, and apparently there is flirting that happens right now in a slimy gutter near you. There are teeny creatures that have more riz than you do.
And me in the sexually reproducing when. There's been a couple of papers describing mating behavior in the last few years, and it's pretty cool. In one of them, it's pretty weird. Actually. This was a German team that had a culture of sexually reproducing species going and they were able to videotape them well okay, and what they saw was that the males were attracted to females who had eggs, and they
figured it was most likely pheromonal and the male. When the male found the female, he would wrap his body around her head and the female. They saw the female using her stilts to poke out into the belly of the male and they presume that was stimulating him. And then he ejaculated multiple times for over an hour what and at the head, so the the sperm was released at the head, and so these researchers thought, well, that must have been you know, just an a barren observation
or maybe a confused male. But they ended up seeing thirty different matings and it was the same every time. And then another study came out after that with a different species and they made it like you would think it was cloaca to cloaca like birds, like chloaqal kiss from a bird. And so my thought on that is, maybe it's such a tiny little distance for sperm to travel they don't care where they release it.
Wild wild Can it get into the reproductive system orally?
That's a great question, and that's one possibility. They never really saw where the sperm was going in. But what happens in that particular species when the female as egg she kind of scrunches her body up inside the cuticle, So you see the big empty cuticle, and she's kind of scrunched up, and she starts to deposit her eggs inside that cuticle. So the front half of her kind of crawling around and the back half is filled with eggs. And at that point there's two openings into the body
into the cuticle. One would be the mouth and one would be the cloaca, And so it could have gone in either way, but it got in because it had to furtilize the eggs inside the cuticle, so it had to get in somehow, So.
Really just use either door.
Hold up.
What is with this overcoat? Though, Let's talk about the cuticle. Is that cuticle squishy like a water balloon or is it kind of rigid or can they change it depending on the external conditions.
Yeah, there's some flexibility. Some places are thicker than others and are more rigid than others, so they have the ability to bend here and there. But generally speaking their semi rigid like a cicada shell. Okay, but microscoptic.
How on Earth or how in space can these little wigglers? How are they surviving desiccated for years? How can they survive in the vacuum of space? What is going on with these very resilient, little, tiny little bad asses.
This is the tartar Grade claim to fame. It's a single most studied aspect of their biology. So we could talk about this for a long time.
Yeah.
The way they survive not just drying out, but all kinds of environmental extremes, including space exposure, which we need to talk about, is they go into an inactive resting state called cryptobiosis, which literally means hidden life. And in this state, they have no measurable water in their bodies, they have no gas exchange going on, no energy usage. They're dead, except they can come back to life. Spooky, and when they're in that condition, they are incredibly resilient.
There's been all these experiments where they expose them to different extremes and see what kind of survival there is. And they've survived complete drying out, complete vacuum temperatures over three hundred degrees fahrenheit, temperatures down to almost minus three hundred degrees fahrenheit, really high levels of radiation like twenty times the estimated maximum dose from the Nagasaki bomb, and much higher pressures than you would experience at the Marianna Strench.
So they can survive really high pressure, low pressure vacuums, extreme temperatures, radiation, and dehydration like nothing. You can imagine. You're never going to catch a tartar grade with the hydroflask, don't eat it.
So incredibly resilient and oh you might think about those experiments, they're kind of evil scientist stuff from a tartar grade point of view. One of them, one recent experiment shot a mautic guns into sandbags to see what kind of impact they could take.
What they do.
They didn't do very well with that. Okay, a little tartar grades. I want all the tartar grades listening to know. I've never done these experiments either way. So they didn't do very well with that experiment. But they're incredibly resilient to pretty much every environmental extreme we can throw at them, and as you mentioned, they can do it for many, many years. And this is even to me more mind blowing. Our understanding of how long they can withstand environmental extremes
has changed over time. We used to say it was about one hundred years. They could live maybe one hundred years, and that was because some people found some moss in a museum that was one hundred years old and they extracted tartar grades, and they said that they got the animals to come out of cryptobiosis. Later people said, yeah, maybe they just saw movement when the animal filled with water.
Turns out, it's not real easy to tell the difference between a cryptobiotic live turtar grade and a cryptobiotic dead tartar grade. So we kind of dropped back from that and then somebody found some samples that were thirty five years old and they definitely got resuscitation. So we've been saying recently that we know they can live at least decades, but I have a prediction that we will soon know that they can live tens of thousands of years.
What how?
And the reason I'll say that is because there have been two papers published in the last three years that found other cryptobiotic animals in ice cores from Siberian permafrost. These were both papers published from Russia, and they brought those animals back to the lab and they thought them out, and they moved and they reproduced. So I think it's fair to say that they were alive.
Mm hmm, long nap immediate boning. Every day is vacation day for a tartar grade. But how long was this nap? So in an email after this chat, Paul wrote me, how long can they survive in cryptobiosis? Indirect evidence of tens of thousands of years? For exclamation points for well earned exclamation points, And he elaborates on those Siberian ice core resurrections.
And one of those was dated to twenty five thousand years ago, and one of them was dated to forty six thousand years ago.
The cores or the tartar grades themselves.
Both the ice cores were dated that long, and so we know that animals were there from that period of time as well. We had no idea they could live that long, and so this was really mind blowing. And tartar grades have at least as sophisticated of cryptobiotic machinery as do the other animals that were found in these cores. Those other animals were rotifers and nematodes. So I think it's just a matter of time before we find tartar grades in those ice cores as well.
Do we have any idea and by we, I'm using I'm including myself in this because I would like to be. I wish I were a tartar gridologist. Dude, that royal. We have any idea how on earth they can survive that? And what kind of implications does that have for mortality in general?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's a good question. Yes, we do have some idea how they do cryptobiosis. And before I tell you that, though, I need to give a little qualification to how tough they are. You know, sometimes because of this ability to stand all these conditions for so long. Tartar grades are called the toughest animals on Earth.
Yeah, that's what I think of when I think of them.
Yeah, and I agree with that, but with two qualifications that are I think important. One is that not all Tartar grades are cryptobiotic. They're fourteen hundred species. Cryptobiosis is a trick of the terrestrial Tartar grades, the ones in mosses and lichens. It's what allowed them to colonize terrestrial habitats. The truly aquatic, either freshwater or marine ones don't have that ability. Oh and the other thing is note that the way that they do cryptobiosis is an inactive state.
They're able to survive environmental extremes by going inactive, but an active animal is pretty easy to kill. So sometimes you read that Tartar grades are extremophiles, and they're really not. They're extremeo tolerant is the better term, and that makes a difference if you're an astrobiologist interested in life on other planets and looking at Earth models for what that might look like. It's really different if you're an extremophile
versus extrematolerant. So my proviso is that some tartar grades are the toughest animals on Earth. When they're sleeping.
Do you think that their brains are just water activated.
Yeah, So here's what happens. Here's how they do this. Back to your question of how they do this. So imagine you're a tartar grade living on a moss cushion and you're happily crawling around in the water film of that moss doing your little tardigrade life. But the sun comes up and the water starts to dry up, and
you're gonna die if you don't do something. So you pull in your legs, you contract all your muscles and curl up, and that expels all the water from your body and you form this little shape called a ton t un, which is a barrel shape. It looks like some other word for a cask or a barrel. So they go into this ton state, and while they do that, they start producing a whole biochemical toolkit of protectant molecules.
And we're learning more about this every year, and there's some biotechnological applications about this as well, which maybe kind of gets to your question about what this means for
longevity and I'm not a biochemist. This isn't my area of study, so I won't go into much detail about this, but we know that this biochemical toolkit includes antioxidants, heat shock proteins, these other really cool proteins called intrinsically disordered proteins, and in some cases they produce a sugar called tree helos. And what all those molecules do is they help DNA not get damaged during cryptobiosis, or if it does get damage, they help fix it. They can stitch it back together again.
They protect the membranes, they protect all the other cells the brain, so they're all working together to protect the whole package. And we don't know the details, but that's generally what's happening. The one particular piece of that that I think is the coolest is the sugar tree holos.
Again, this is a wild so in.
The ones that produce tree helos, what they do is they start to dry out. They produce this simple sugar and some of these other proteins connect with the sugar and they start to convert the animal from its liquid state to a glass like state in the process called vitrification. So it's like if you had a bag of gummy bears, just regular gunners spilled open and dried out for months and months and months, they would become hardened and they'd
become like a little rigid gummy bear. That's exactly what's happening with these Tartar grades is they become rigid, little microscopic gummy bears that are hardened in glass like because of the sugar casing that forms a matrix protecting all the cells in their body.
Oh wow, is it water soluble?
Then it is, Yeah, it is, so this is would happen when it's drying out. A really cool biotechnological application of that is a pharmaceutical company has used biomemicry where they said, hey, that's a cool thing that some of these animals, like Tartar grades do this vitrification thing. I wonder if we can use vitrification to stabilize vaccines for
long periods of time. And they actually they didn't use the exact same sugar, but they used another sugar and they created little tiny sugar globules that captured the vaccines and it worked. They have huge long shell life and when they're injected in the body, the sugar just disperses and mounts and then the vaccine can be released. Wow.
Oh, I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask you one million?
Sure? Sure?
Okay? And before we get to here one million questions patrons, Let's first toss a little money toward a reputable cause, and this week Paul picked the wonderful Zerxi Society. We love them. For over fifty years, the Zerxi Society for Invertebrate Conservation has protected endangered species and their habitats, produced groundbreaking publications, trained thousands of farmers and land managers to conserve habitat, and raised awareness about the importance and plight
of invertebrates in forests, prairies, deserts and in oceans. So you can find out more about their programs at zercees xerces dot org, which is linked in the show notes. And that donation was made.
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The hearn okay now in your questions. Patrons submitted these via patreon dot com. Slash ologies were for one dollar a month. I may ask your question and say your name with my mouth. We even have tears to leave us an audio message so you could hear your voice
on the show. But yes, this one was asked by patrons Rowan Tree, PAVCA thirty four, Levi I Morris, Laura M. Smithberg, Gilly Magzaroni, Gabriel Charmoney, Christine Hurley's Douggie, Rosi Hope, Madeline and Gregorias of Tomsk in their words, asked, is it possible Tarta Grade had once hitched a ride on an asteroid from another solar system? We were talking about and how they survive in space? But essentially, are the aliens? Did they come from space? How do they do what
they do? Did they come from another planet?
Yes, Virginia, they are aliens.
Oh, thank you. Yes, Virginia. Is what people say when they allow you to believe in magic and they don't ruin it for.
You in the sense that they're exotic and unusual to most people. Okay, but it's not because the Tartar grades and where their home planet is. It's because people don't pay attention to the microscopic world. So, yeah, why do you think people ask that question.
I think that they seem so much heartier, and we maybe compare them to ourselves, and so we think if we are the standard species on the planet, because that's how humans think, and they are so different. They must be from Mars.
Yeah, and they survive space exposure, right right?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, okay, Well let me think about that a while.
No, no hard, no, no great, So.
A couple things come to mind. The studies that expose them to space have a huge fine print qualification that we need to talk about. The headline is that tartar grades survived space exposure. The details are much more nuanced than that, and the reality is they did not survive all the hazards of space, so that piece of the observation doesn't really fit. No, they can't survive long term travel through space. And when you look at them, maybe they look unusual if you haven't seen a whole lot
of other related invertebrates. But they're DNA's just like our DNA. They have gene sequences base pair for base pair. They're just like closely related species. The biochemistry of their cuticle and their molting processes just like other molting animals. They're obviously very closely related to Earth animals unless all of them came from somewhere else. Maybe not likely, probably not so.
Flim flam fusted. Tartar grades are not aliens on Earth. It's okay, We'll be okay.
Yeah, that idea. By the way, astrobiology is the study of the possibility of life on other planets and a look at tartar grades and other extreme survival animals to see if they can tell them something about what to look for. And one particular idea that's very controversial from that is this idea of panspermia. Yes, which is the idea that maybe organisms have hopped from one planet to
another through asteroids. Oh, that experiment I mentioned about getting shot out of guns, that was the motivation for that. They wanted to determine if they could withstand an impact similar to a meteor hitting a planet, and the answer was.
Ohellma, okay.
Carlos Alvarez wants to know.
I read a few years ago that some of them were sent in a lunar module to the Moon and it crashed and now they're spilled somewhere on the.
Moon, but an engine fold caused it to crash, scattering into thousands of pieces.
It makes me think of the times we have moved species around on this planet and created a whole new nightmare. What are the chances that these are surviving there, and what are the unknown things that we may have just done to the Moon. You know, one day in a million years, it's just covered in Tarti grades.
Yeah. You know, when I heard about that, I thought it was a joke. You know, it was like an Israeli space mission sent a liner module the Moon and it crashed and it had Tarti grades on it. I was thinking, Okay, yeah, what's the punchline. But it was real. It was real, and yeah, I was kind of shocked, and my colleagues and I talked about this. I don't
understand the motivation. They had several things in the payload of that module that were Earth relics, including Tarte grades in cryptobiosis, and I never quite understood the logic behind that and what they were planning on with that, but yeah, it crashed. The people that studied did the shooting out of the gun thing said they wouldn't even have survived that crash, much less a meteor hitting a planet, so
they don't think that they survived. There's also no atmosphere on the Moon and so there's really no way for them to come out of cryptobiosis on the Moon. So if they did survive that impact, I think they could still be in cryptobiosis, but there's no way for them to come out of cryptobiosis. It does raise, I think, a legitimate, real ethical question about sending Earth organisms to
other places. And in fact, there was a lot of discussion about that, and the authors of that study, the Lunar module study, said, well, we know that that's a problem. We wouldn't do that any place that actually had an atmosphere where they could survive. So why they did it to the Moon I don't know still, but they did.
Let's say that some sprinklers went off on the Moon and they did rehydrate and they came out of it, and all there was to eat were the other tartar grades. Do they ever cannibalize?
They don't cannibalize. Okay, but big ones eat smaller ones, and so yeah, they could, they could. Yeah.
Yes. If you saw a headline this week such as spiders on Mars fully awakened on Earth for first time and scientists are shrieking with joy, don't take that clickbait or just do, but note that it's about cracks on the surface of Mars that look like spiders from Afar.
Astrogeologists have figured out why they happened, hence these things are called are aneaform terrain named after spiders, but alas there are no real giant spiders on Mars, although we do have an entire astrobiology episode with doctor Kevin Hand, who's a NASA researcher looking for life on the Jupiter moon Europa. We'll link in the show notes. But on the topic of animals that will be astronauts, Katie Oldman first time question asker asked, could should we have we
already tried sending them into space? And other patrons such as Gwen Hughes, Reuben Nikitchribitz, Brian Smith, Mary and Rachel Guthrie, Christian Fuller, Aaron Sorens and Zephyr and Sidney Kaneing in Sydney's words, said, wait, how did we figure out the space thing? It's a good question. I thought that they just went into cryptobiosis, but how did they survive space exposure?
That is, yeah, that's what launched them into fame. Ah, they did indeed survive space exposure. So what happened is there were four different experiments that were done that included tartar grades in space. In two thousand and seven there was a photon M three satellite mission that had three different modules on board with tartar grades, and then in twenty eleven there was a fourth one that went up to the International Space Station and collectively they had five
different species of tartar grades on board. They had eggs, animals in cryptobiosis, and in one study they actually had active animals not in cryptobiosis, and they exposed them to different aspects of space, brought them back to Earth, looked at how many survived, and what they found collectively is that when the animals were exposed to the microgravity and the cosmic radiation of space, they survived really really well,
including the ones that were not in cryptobiosis. And that was huge news because no animals have ever survived space exposure. Of course, that'd be a really nasty experiment to do to you know, little space monkey or something. But it was huge news, a lot of press about it, very spectacular results, but there's a lot of fine print that
isn't ever talked about. And the fine print is that it wasn't like they had them on little microtethers on space walks and they brought them back into the spaceship. They weren't exposed to all aspects of space. They were exposed to some aspects of space. They were enclosed cases, so in all of those experiments they were in temperature controlled cases, and so they didn't get exposed to the
huge temperature fluctuations of space. And in the case of the active animals, they were not exposed to the vacuum of space, for example, And in all of them except one they were protected from UV radiation, and in the one in which they were exposed to full spectrum UV, they died pretty quickly. So the headline was Tarti Gray's survive exposure to space, but the details are they could handle some aspects of space, which is shocking and amazing, but they didn't handle to total exposure. To space.
So the hard vacuum of outer space survivable for many of the tartar grade astronauts. Now the vacuum plus the solar radiation, which is true to space less survivable. Ah okay, Well that demystifies them. Yeah, and also probably will be very helpful in busting the flip flame that they are aliens exactly exactly. I like the idea too that people here that octopuses are so out there and interesting they must also be aliens. I like the idea that an
octopus just has armloads of tartar grades. They're careening on an astroid, they crash in and they're like, what's up? We heard the bugs of it up. So if tartar grades and the world in miniature interests, you consider getting your hooks into this research. And on that note, Petron Scarlet p wanted to know what are the claw looking things on the tartar grade's feet and what are they for? And eating dog hair for a living ast what are
those flipper looking things on their stumps used for? And this topic was also on the minds of Jacolin Church Flush first Odoctopus Spella, average Pie, Susan Lynn, and Addie Capello said, they're like water wombats. Look at those talons. What are those claws on their feet for?
Actually, yeah, the ones that have claws, they use them to hold onto the sediment. They're crawling around, grasping hold of the sediment. The ones on the fourth pair of legs that are turned around backwards that I mentioned before, in a lot of cases, they use those like prehensile organs. They hold on with those, and then when they want to move they let go of those and.
Crawl with the first three pairs of legs, kind of like a rear wheel drive, I guess.
But not all targer grades have claws, and especially the marine ones are really hyper diverse and have a whole array of different feet type, including some that have fingers that end in adhesive pads, and all kinds of really cool differences. And so that's again the problem of kind of thinking about the kind that floats around on the internet too much.
M Amber Panita and Sirih Grossman. First time question asker wanted to know about their number of legs. Siri asked, eight legs. Why is that some primal, perfect optimal walking number of legs?
Well, they have five body segments and there's a leg for each of the segments except for the head. And there's some really cool evo devo studies that found out that what happened as they got miniaturized from ancestral lobopodians, which were macroscopic, is that the middle segments of the body got chopped out and left the other segments, and so they evolved from multi legged more like millipede like things. Oh, I mean, those are arthropods with jointed legs, but they
look kind of like lobi. They look like caterpillars with loby legs. And so as those segments got cut out, five segments were left for one pair of leg for all the segments except for the head.
Well, Sophie Develle, first time question asker, says, I'm a dentist and I would love to note if they have teeth, and if they do, what are they like?
A good question. Some do have teeth, and they're thickenings around the mouth. The mouth's a circle and there are sometimes one, two or three rows of dentate structures that poke inward, and so they're kind of laterally oriented around this circle and they're poking inward and they probably use them for grasping as they try to suck stuff down their bugle tube.
Do they ever suck down any nasties and get food poisoning? Frina run Stadler asked what kind of immune system does the tartar grate have, and Janie Jones was concerned do they get sick? Ali and Julian want to know are they affected by bacteria and viruses?
We know there's some parasitic funguses that have attacked them, and I think some other protozoan can't remember which what now. And there's some marine ones that have these pouches on the head that are packed with bacteria, and apparently they have a symbiosis with these bacteria and are using them for something presumably maybe chemosynthesis or something like that. Don't really know. So somehow they're getting probably getting nutrients from
these bacteria. Oh, there have been a couple studies of tartargrade microbiomes recently, really yeah, and they have found a whole series of bacteria and other things that are in their guts.
Oh, that's exciting, But I.
Don't know about any bacteria that are disease causing.
Speaking of peril sad question, Rebecca, if it's given Povka thirty four tricyclecent want to know, in Rebecca's words, are they being impacted by climate change? Rising tides lift all water bears?
They ask, hopeful, Yeah, that's hopeful.
Well, there have been some studies of them being impacted by climate change. There's some people doing some really cool studies in glaciers, and there are these things called cryoconite holes, which are circular tubular holes that form as ice melts and then it gathers some gunk in the bottom and then some animals colonize it. Not very many, but a few things can colonize those croyut nite holes. And they've been talking about concerns as the glaciers melt, that is
having potential negative impacts. And this other study recently looked at those stylets that I mentioned. The paired stylets have calcim carbonate in them, so.
A reminder, a stylet is like a mouth knife, and when tartagrades molt, these fall off and then they just secrete new ones with glands near their face opening and.
Are therefore potentially impacted by acid. And so they have looked at whether or not acidic conditions can erode those things like in ocean acidification. Perhaps, so there is some indication that it could damage things, and that's right now, a lab study instead of a field study.
Susan Mashrak wanted to know. I wonder, since they've survived so much, how they'll do with the microplastic crisis we're currently in. Did anyone ever find microplastics in their little guts?
You know, that's a funny question. I just saw a paper that was looking at microplastics and microscopic organisms, and for some reason, they found them in all kinds of other microscopic animals that were in their habitats, but not in the tartar grades stop. Somehow they weren't picking up the microplastics. It was just one study just came out. I have no idea why that was the case, but I do think it's possible that they could be picking
them up. It might be that they because of using those stylets, maybe it acts as a filter somehow and they can't pick them up. I don't know, but I would think that eventually we'll find them in there, as long.
As we're growing ever more fond of them. What is the correct term of endearment? Josie Rutherford asked, some people call these water bears, others potato walruss. Is this one of those tests where what you see reveals an aspect of your deep psyche. Andrew mckelvey's Izzy, Emily heard, Mona fin Layson, Emily Venko, and Miranda Panda also had etymological questions, as well as Belle Aspiring garbage archaeologists wants to know why did the nicknames waterbear and moss piglet? Where do
those come from? And which would you say is more accurate?
Ah, moss piglets is not very inclusive. Okay, that's right, all of those that live on moss, right, So I wouldn't use that term. When you look at tartar grades through a microscope, when you look at in that little world, you see all these wormy kind of things that move in a wormy like fashion. But when you see tarte grays move really differently. Right. They're they're kind of wiggling their their fat and chubby, and they have these thick legs that they're waving gently. Their head moves a little
bit side to side. Some of them have these big, soulful highs, right, so they kind of look mammalian. And the very first person who ever described to tartar grade was Johann Gutza back in seventeen seventy three, and he, in that very first paper ever written on tarta grades, thought that they looked like Kleiner Vasserbert little water bears.
So we have a two part ersonology episode all about bears, as well as a carnivore ecology episode with Arthur Ray Winn Grant. And yes, they are linked in the show notes.
So that's the most common common name. By the way, there's some pop culture trivia about Gutsa. Yes, tell me you ought to know? Yeah, of course, very it's trivial trivia. You know the you know the TV show Star Trek Discovery.
Yes, we had people ask about that. Yeah, we had several people ask about this, Okay. Patricia Evans, Daniel Sucher, Becky Disasci Segret scientist, and Luna Rose.
They have character that the crew members call Ripper, and it's a human size tartar grade.
Like alien, Hello, brought you the good stuff.
And it allows them to do giant hops through the universe because, of course it has a symbiotic relationship with space Mycelia. Of course, of course, on a side, an offshoot of Star Trek Discovery, we learn that ripper preferred name is Ephrahim, which is Johann Gutz's middle name.
Oh that's very sweet. That's so sweet. I love that.
If you win bar trivia with that question, I want half of your winnings.
I just said that in an episode that went up about k waves literally yesterday, I was like, we're winning a lot of bars, where's our ten versaid? Also, Paul casually mentioned that yes, well, tartar grades are cute, and they have cryptobiotic superpowers. Some of them fluoresce in these beautiful colors. He calls them disco bears. And one of his most recent research projects was exploring autofluorescence in tartar grades,
which is different from bioluminescence. Apparently autofluorescence happens by absorbing light, and then bioluminescence is chemical and caused by an enzyme. But we could go on and on. Let's get to how do you meet one and hopefully befriend a tartar grade? So many people we gotta know. How do you find them? I get them? How do we look at tartar grades? How do we do it?
Now that I can help you with. But basically you gotta have a microscope how strong you know, even a forty power dissecting scope and see them and tell that they're tartar grades. You can't like look at fine structures to identify them, but you can tell that they're tartar grades just with a simple, inexpensive microscope. And so what we do is we make these pipe plates, sieves, Barreman's funnels,
they're called. And so you take a styrofoam plate, you put another one on top of it, and cut a hole out of the bottom and put a screen on it, and then put a tissue paper over that, and then crumble up a moss all over that and then fill it with water. And it helps if you shine a light on them, and what happens is they move away from the light and away from the heat, and they go down through the tissue paper. The animals go through the tissue paper and gather down in the water on
the bottom pie plate. And then you can just pour that off into a petri dish and you can find them.
So, yes, this is called a Bareman funnel. And there are a lot of ways and materials you can diy this, including just using a regular funnel with a little tubing to kind of stop it at the end, make a ja at the end of it. You can just put like a coffee filter or pantyhose or a cheese cloth at the bottom of the funnel. You wet your moss so that you have like an inch of that kind of soupy water at the bottom, and sixteen or so hours later your critters will move away from the light
and through the filter and into that tubing. So then you could take that and then you can see them pretty cleanly in a dish under the microscope.
And if you look in mosses, lichens, leaf, litter, soil grit in your gutter, they will be there.
No, so forty power is enough. Some of them are look transparent, So do you kind of get an eye for it so you don't glaze over them? Or are they pretty obvious?
Yeah, some of them can be very transparent. Some of them are very small, very transparent, sometimes rare, so you have to be patient. It helps if you have samples so the animals are still alive, so you can see that movement, because the movement is very characteristic. Nothing else moves like that.
More on those moves in a moment.
The trick is, once you have them and you found them, and if you want to look at them at higher magnification, you got to transfer them to a microscope slide and look at a high powered microscope. And to do that you have to have like some kind of permanent mounting medium, and when you do that, you can't transfer water into it. So what we have is tiny little tartar grade lassos and we can flick them up, catch them on the lasso, and then transfer them over to the mounting medium and.
Do they perish in the process, Yes?
Probably? Okay, that's free.
Can you describe that locomotion that is not computer generated?
Yeah, So they all four legs are constantly moving, and especially if you have them on a petri dish, so they can't grab hold of something, they're kind of laying on their backs, kind of just in one spot, flailing their legs and so they're they're moving their legs and they all are moving kind of at their own rate,
so they're not synchronized or anything. They're just kind of waving around and then the heads moving side to side slowly, and so they just immediately look like a little bear with eight legs instead of four.
With all of this love for tartar grades, because we love them so much, there must be something about your job as a tartar gradologist that sucks, or something about tartar grades that maybe gets your goat anything bad about your job, we will ask the best thing.
Okay, let's see. I think one thing about studying tartar grades is that sometimes it can be dismissed by some people because they're like a niche animal, you know, they're they're like, why would you study a little critter like that? You know, it's not it doesn't have human impact. So some there's a little bit of that, Oh they're so cute. It's kind of like, oh, you're doing that cute kind
of stuff, So there's a little bit of that maybe. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would have studied tartar grades early in my career because I don't think I would have sat at a microscope that long. You know, there's the work for tartar grade ologists is to go out in the field one day and then you have weeks and weeks of lab work to do and microscopy to do. So you gotta be willing and interested in microscopes and be willing to sit in a lab in a microscope
to study them. It's not like going to the Serengetti and you know, watching tartar grades clash into one another and that kind of thing. It doesn't you know.
Do you have playlists in the lab like you're just jamming out? Do you listen to books on tape?
Yeah? I have all kinds of playlists. There's nothing tartar grade specific.
Though someone did ask about Cosmo shell Drake speaking of music, how accurate is the song tartar Grade song by Cosmo Shelldrakes.
My sall my liquid and lets myself try out our friv and.
Sleep LEXI gotshl emmett Wald both asked and dig rode in not a question, but I ironically woke up with Cosmo shell drakes tartar Grade song stuck in my head this morning. Dig cosmically connected. We're going to have to add it to your playlist no matter what.
Yeah, we need that, and I've heard it, but it's been a long time since I've heard it. My favorite tartar grade song is won by Mal Webb, who's an Australian guy that does all of his music by mouth sounds I wish and I'd be comfy and awhere. I think it's hilarious and it's very accurate really in terms of he talks about centuries of happy dozing and I want to be a tartar grade.
I haven't blame them, but of course, now that we know the toughest thing, what is the best thing about tartar grades. What's the best thing about being a tartargardologist? You have such a cool job and life.
Well, the best thing is that they are charismatic and so people like them, and they've gotten to be famous. They weren't famous when I started studying them, and so that was kind of just an accident that they survived space exposure and got famous because of that. And that's really it's fun because people know about them now and so people want to know about them, and that's not
true for most microscopic life. And it's useful to me because my ulterior motive is for students of all ages, is to get people interested in microscopic life because it's so abundant and so crazy and so poorly studied. So tartar grades are a great hook to do that.
This has been one of my favorite episodes. I don't like to name favorite episodes. Is one of my favorite ever. This has been such a wonderful privilege to talk to you about tartar grades. I have a feeling that because of this, there will be future tartar gradologists. Well. Michelle
Weldman fellow tartar gredologist. They spent the past year studying tartar grades for their masters thesis and they're currently in the process of writing up the report for it, so I know they have a tartar gradologist to chartgredologists question here.
So my question for theologists is what they think the future of tarte grade research should be or should look like. Do I think we need to focus more on their distributions and diversities, or their physiological mechanisms that are responsible for things like cryptobiosis. I'm so excited that you're finally getting a chance to touch up on this topic. It's an extremely interesting study. And yeah, I love your podcast and really excited for.
This, would you say, Rochelle Rochelle, Yeah.
So great question. I'm not sure what it should do. I know what it's been doing. I mean the history of tartar grade research has changed over time. I think as more and more people have started studying Tarte grades and as molecular biology has kind of moved into the scene, it used to be that a lot of Tartar grade researchers were at small colleges doing a lot of natural history kind of stuff, taxonomy kind of stuff, a little
bit of ecology. And part of that was because there wasn't a lot of funding for because they're not human pests. You know, they're not economically important to humans, which I find kind of charming.
Really, they don't need us, they don't need us.
It's great. So it was mostly people with small or no grants kind of messing around having fun. Now that we are learning a lot more about these biochemical toolkit for cryptobiosis and possible applications of that, big science is taking over. Molecular science, I think, is moving in and it's great. I mean, it's opening all kinds of doors.
So I would fear for this is an old guy talk and this is a dinosaur kind of comment, but I would fear for us to move all the way into the world of molecular biology and forget the field natural history, because if you don't know the species and where they live, and what they're doing, you can't connect it to real world stuff. So I hope we continue
that we've that is a problem. There's not a whole lot of tart of grade ologists who are doing things that are ecology related natural history related anymore.
If someone decides tartar grades are their destiny, should they just google how to become a tartar gradologist?
Now they can contact me, email me. I'll help you. I'm always wanting more people to study. We have very few people that are studying them, and especially doing the natural history kind of stuff us old timers do. So I help anybody that contacts me, I help them get started.
Watch out watcher in box, so ask terrific people tartagrad iological questions and actually, wait one more. Okay, what is Paul's favorite species of tartar grade among the numerous out there. He told me in a note later that it's the marine tartar grade Tenarctis bubble Ubus tenarctis bubble ubus, real name, And in his words, it has a cluster of balloons
growing out of its butt. And I look this up and truly it is a little idy bitty creature trailing what looks like a handful of balloon like imagine of the house from up was microscopic and it was a water bear instead of a house balloons out his butt. Paul, You're a treasure. We adore you to find out more about Paul's work. We have linked to it in the show notes, as well as two Smologies, which is our
spinoffs show that is safe for kids. There's also a link to Zercees dot org and so many other episodes you might like, as well as to our Patreon so you can submit questions yourself, and there are links to our social media. We are at Ologies on Instagram and X. I'm at Ali Ward It's just one L and Ali on Instagram and X as well. Aaron Talbert Adminsiologies podcast Facebook group and has also been my bff since we were four, so we have slurged around many algae filled
ditches together among so many tartar grades. Thank you Erin for being my partner that Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth is our wonderful scheduling producer and Susan Hale managing directs us as managing director and also does some additional research Kelly Rtwyer does the website, and our sole
non woman contributor is the lovely editor Jake Chafe. And getting all the pieces together so that we are not tardy ourselves is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret, and this week it's that. Listen. Sometimes my face gets fuzzy, and sometimes I do what is called derma planing, which is another word for shaving your face.
Just a razor. It's a regular razor you would use on your legs, but I used it on my face and I did it, and I thought, ah, that's a little smoother. It's just peach fuzz but you know what I mean, just get it off. And I did that, and then I just went to record. And I want you to know that I have tiny hairs from my face now stuck to my face and they itch and I want to wash my face. And I don't want
to tell you this, but I need. I needed a secret for this one, and I thought, why give you a life hack when I could reveal something even more true and disgusting. Listen, it's called dermo planing. Okay, it helps your moisturizerance absorb butter. I gotta wash my face, Okay for bye. Pacodermatology, homiology, ydo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, al metteratology, nathology, seriology, seldology.
Get into space your dirty tart of grade see