Every time we do the “Life In The Littlest Loch” experiment with S2 I have a quick look at the water sample I’ve taken to see if I can find a tardigrade, because they’re the coolest little animals ever, and today I found one for the first time! It was in some of the moss on the concrete in front of the school

Tardigrades, also known as “Water Bears” or “Moss Piglets” are about half a millimetre long (they’d look like a speck of dust to the naked eye), and they’re about as close to invincible as any animal gets. They’ll survive very high and low temperatures (150C, oven temperatures, down to -273C, near absolute zero), high and low pressures (from 6x what you find in the deepest ocean, to the vacuum of outer space), and radiation doses hundreds of times higher than those that would kill a human.
They can intentionally dehydrate themselves, meaning that they “mummify” and can go for more than 30 years without food or water, but then wake up again when conditions seem better.

Because they’re so tough they’re found almost everywhere in the world, from hot springs to miles under the ice in Antarctica. In 2007 some dehydrated tardigrades were sent into space on the FOTON-M3 mission, exposed to outer space for TEN DAYS, returned to Earth, and when rehydrated just carried on munching away at stuff like nothing had happened!