Since tardigrades are either blind or have extremely limited visual ability and probably seldom come in contact with others they should have little use for emotion. Basically, all organisms have emotions.

You can use a microscope with a magnification of 20x to track down water bears in a piece of moss. If you do not have a microscope at school, you can also find them with a magnifying glass with a magnification of 10x. But then the water bears will still look very small and you may not be able to see their legs.

No, at least not to humans. They cannot survive the trip through the human digestive tract since our stomach acid disintegrates the flesh of the tardigrade without much trouble, so eating one wouldn’t do any harm.

Researchers showed it takes 48 hours at 37.1 °C (98.8 °F) to kill half of active tardigrades that have not been acclimated to heat. Acclimation boosted the temperature needed to kill half of active tardigrades to 37.6 °C (99.7 °F). Tardigrades in the tun state fared a bit better, tolerating higher temperatures.

Humans can’t live in a world without water. When there’s no water around, this micro-animal can enter a type of cryptobiosis, or state of very low metabolic activity, in which it’s preserved in a desiccated “tun” form—sometimes for years—until water is reintroduced.

Tardigrades are among the most successful lifeforms, having survived all five mass extinctions. Recent research suggest they may also do something we like to think only humans do: snuggle for affection.

Tardigrades are semi-aquatic. They can survive in watery as well as terrestrial environments — from oceans and lakes to mountains, forests and sand dunes. They’re found all over the world, from frigid Antarctic glaciers to active lava fields. They’re most commonly found living in moss.

Tardigrades have a dorsal brain atop a paired ventral nervous system. (Humans have a dorsal brain and a single dorsal nervous system.) The body cavity of tardigrades is an open hemocoel that touches every cell, allowing efficient nutrition and gas exchange with no need for circulatory or respiratory systems.

Rapidly expanding water molecules are dangerous because they can rupture cells, which can be fatal. You might expect that tardigrades would use this trick to survive drying, but according to Boothby, only some species seem to make trehalose.

Predators include nematodes, other tardigrades, mites, spiders, springtails, and insect larvae; parasitic protozoa and fungi often infect tardigrade populations (Ramazzotti and Maucci, 1983). “Ecosystem grazers” such as freshwater crustaceans, earthworms, and arthropods also ablate tardigrade populations.

“Many species of tardigrades live in water, but on land, you find them almost everywhere there’s moss or lichen.” In 2007, scientists discovered these microscopic critters can survive an extended stay in the cold, irradiated vacuum of outer space.

Experiments of the adaption of microbes in space have yielded unpredictable results. While sometimes the microorganism may weaken, they can also increase in their disease-causing potency. NASA has pointed out that normal adults have ten times as many microbial cells as human cells in their bodies.

Clumps of bacteria survived for three years on the outer surface of the International Space Station, pictured here. They were shielded from the hazards of space by only themselves. New research suggests such clumps might be able to survive a trip between Earth and Mars.

Now, new findings published today in Frontiers in Microbiology, based on that experiment on the International Space Station, show that the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans can survive at least three years in space. radiodurans against simulated International Space Station conditions.