Latest news with #Milnesiumtardigradum
BBC News
07-04-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Who is the invertebrate of the year?
Have you ever heard of a Milnesium tardigradum or tardigrade? The insect has just received a very unusual award - invertebrate of the year 2025!The contest was run by the Guardian newspaper, with readers putting forward more than 2,000 nominations before these were edited down to a shortlist of 10.A public vote then took place from 2-4 April, and the winner has now been revealed. Competition organiser Patrick Barkham said that the aim of the competition was "to celebrate the spineless species that make up 95% of animal life on earth".Last year's winner was the earthworm, who was crowned the first winner of the UK invertebrate of the year in 2024. An invertebrate is an animal that doesn't have a backbone. Many invertebrates, like insects and spiders, have a hard outer casing called an exoskeleton, which protects their body a bit like a suit of tardigrade, nicknamed the water bear, is incredibly tiny - the size of a speck of dust - but has an extraordinary ability to survive in difficult circumstances. They often live in aquatic and semi-aquatic habitats such as lichen and damp moss. They are found throughout the world, including regions of extreme temperature, such as hot springs, and extreme pressure, such as deep underwaterExplaining why the tardigrade was a good choice to win, Patrick said: "We are drawn to tiny but resilient animals in times of global political turmoil. When we feel small and powerless, the mighty, microscopic tardigrades give us hope. " Now a special team of scientists in Cambridge plan to study tardigrades to find out what we can learn from their unique "superpowers".For example they can survive radiation, by shrinking themselves and completely drying out their cells. Their DNA is then preserved. In this state they requires no food or water and when they wants to rehydrate again, they can get back to their original state in as little as 25 minutes. Understanding this process could help researchers make other materials that are resistant to very extreme conditions - maybe vaccines that don't need to be kept in the fridge, or astronauts that can better withstand the radiation in space. By researching the tardigrades scientists hope they can understand more about how the tiny animals have become so resilient. The shortlist of the final 10 included: 1. The tongue-biting louse burrows in through a fish's gills, clings to its tongue and eats what the fish eats.2. The dark-edged bee-fly pretends to be a bee but is actually a fly that twerks.3. Multi-segmented micro-animal Milnesium tardigradum has survived five great extinction events.4. The flamboyant cuttlefish flashes a dazzling array of psychedelic colours to warn predators they are toxic.5. The giant Gippsland earthworm can grow up to 3 metres in length.6. The all-female microscopic common rotifer has thrived without males for millions of years.7. The fen raft spider walks on water and has been revived from near-extinction in Britain.8. The ultra-rare amber comet firefly emits a burning flash of light, following by a trailing glow.9. The Wētāpunga is a flightless grasshopper that's the heaviest insect in the world.10. The monarch butterfly migrates for 3,000 miles.
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
It's heroic, hardy and less than a millimetre long: meet the 2025 invertebrate of the year
If you didn't vote in the recent ballot, you missed out. Here was a vote where all 10 candidates were creative and morally upstanding, a vote unsullied by dubious lobbies, dodgy polls or demagogues. And if you're seeking inspiration from a figure of strength who is also strangely cute then look no further than the winner of 2025: Milnesium tardigradum, a microscopic multisegmented animal that resembles a piglet wrapped in an enormous duvet. Thousands of Guardian readers around the world voted in the contest, which we invented to celebrate the overlooked, unsung heroes of our planet. It is easy to remain indifferent to invertebrates. In cities or in the countryside, small, spineless things barely touch our lives. The animals we adore tend to have spines: birds that have adapted to living alongside us or mammals we've co-opted as pets or sources of protein. But we backboned beasts are a tiny minority, barely 5% of the planet's species. Most life on Earth has chosen a spineless path, and they are animals of amazing diversity: beetles, bivalves, bees; corals, crabs, cephalopods; snails, spiders and sponges. Many of these animals perform vital functions for our habitable planet. Invertebrates supply the vast majority of pollination that enables us to grow food, and enjoy flowers. Invertebrates make soil, and keep it fertile. They clean water and tidy land, devouring poo or decomposing animals, repelling everything from bad smells to deadly diseases. Of course, some also spread diseases, and may swarm, pest or plague human life. But were invertebrates to completely disappear – and in human-dominated places, they are irrefutably disappearing – sapiens would swiftly follow. Somehow, however, stressing their importance to human prosperity diminishes these animals. They are not simply dull little butlers dutifully scurrying in the service of their human masters. They are gloriously independent animals. They don't need us half as much as we need them. They also embody ways of life that look extraordinarily exotic to our eyes. Among the 10 shortlisted animals – all nominated by the global community of Guardian readers – is the tongue-biting louse, a tiny crustacean that burrows into a fish's gills and clings to its tongue, eating what the fish eats and sharing enough so the fish stays alive – for years. Then there's the fen raft spider: it runs on land, walks on water and even dives beneath it in search of prey – small fish and dragonflies – larger than itself. The winner, one of the tardigrades, is particularly impressive. Milnesium tardigradum has endured all five previous planetary extinction events. Given that, it was a doddle for some individuals to survive being chucked into outer space as an experiment. Its victory might show we are drawn to tiny but resilient animals in times of global political turmoil. When we feel small and powerless, the mighty, microscopic tardigrades give us hope. In crude journalistic terms, all these invertebrates are great stories. For me and my colleagues, spending most of our days dutifully reporting more examples of how we are degrading and destroying life on Earth, the Invertebrate of the Year contest is light relief – for us and hopefully for you too. But something happens when we start sharing more of these spineless stories. Each animal challenges our anthropocentric worldview. We realise our own lifestyles are just as weird as the wētāpunga, a giant flightless, jumpless grasshopper. Perhaps we reflect on the value of diverse thinking within our own species too. And most of all, we start to notice small things around us. What is that fly rubbing its body with his forearms on my windowsill thinking? Why is that ant in such a hurry? We begin to take an interest in the doings of our neighbours. The great American biologist EO Wilson predicted that human life would not long survive the demise of the invertebrates. But he also devised a plangent term for this epoch from ancient Greek: the Eremocene, a new, isolated place. Our era is not just the human-dominated Anthropocene; it is an age of loneliness. When I glanced around me the other day on a bustling London railway platform, I could not see another friend or neighbour. There was no trace of any other animal, plant or fungi. Just us. We are a gregarious species and we are becoming solitary, and we barely realise this is breaking our hearts. So the Invertebrate of the Year contest helps us seek connection with friendly neighbours, who live so differently from us but who thrive all the same. Compiling the shortlist of 10, I came to see them as global celebrities. Then I popped into my ordinary suburban garden for a break in the sunshine. Idly staring into space, I spotted a little flying narwhal. She was humming like a bee, cute and fluffy like a bee but was actually a dark-edged bee-fly – one of our shortlist. Her long, stiff proboscis was like a narwhal's tusk. As she flew, she dropped eggs on to the grass – near unseen nests of solitary bees so her babies could eat the bees' offspring. Gruesome, perhaps, but one small sign of a healthy ecosystem – pollinators, predators and parasites, all fitting together. Now it is us who don't fit. Noticing invertebrates is one small step in recognising that we are not alone, and we share our planet with a wondrous multitude of life and must do better to live gently alongside them. Patrick Barkham writes for the Guardian on natural history
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
‘Lego and tardigrades': when humans finally destroy the world, what will remain?
When Homo sapiens self-destructs and takes much of the world with it, what will remain? Lego and tardigrades, predicts Sandy Edwards, who is among many readers to nominate the mighty, tiny tardigrade. Edwards, from St Andrews in Scotland, says: 'Survivalists! When it comes to the end of the world, they, and Lego, are all that will remain!' Mirko Tosoni, based in Amsterdam, is another fan. 'They are the only one who ever survived five mass extinctions on Earth – talk about resilience! They also live in the most uninhabitable places, from the moon to the deepest sea, and yet are around us every day too, in the moss of your garden, for example. Don't we all need more resilience in this messed-up world we live in?' We are all feeling vulnerable at the moment. In gloomy geopolitical times, when we feel small and powerless, we are drawn to similarly small species whose resilience carry a message of hope. And there is none more resilient than the tardigrades, a phylum of eight-segmented micro-animals that measure less than a millimetre long. Our nominee, the 0.5mm-long Milnesium tardigradum, survived in outer space when plonked there as part of a European Space Agency experiment. Tardigrades can endure radioactivity, most cancers, extreme cold, scorching heat, zero gravity, being shot from a gun and being trapped in a freezer for – wait for it – 30 years. Most remarkably of all, this astonishingly tough invertebrate is also incredibly cute. When the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze discovered these animals in 1773 he named them the 'little water bear'. They're also affectionately known as moss piglets, as their cute, plump forms can often be enjoyed if moss or lichen is put under a microscope. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Their name comes from the 18th-century Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani, who named them 'tardigrada' ('slow steppers') after their plodding walking style on their four pairs of legs. Like us, M tardigradum is an omnivore; unlike us, it grazes on algae while also predating rotifers, nematodes and other smaller tardigrades. The secret to its resilience is its ability to suspend its metabolism and halt the ageing process. Tardigrades evolved in water, and require a film of water around their bodies to enable them to survive. If they are exposed to freezing or drying, they enter a desiccated state called a tun. In this state, they can survive for many years – instantly reviving when they encounter water. With such superpowers, tardigrades have survived all five great extinction events. They've been making a living on Earth for 600m years, and they are already a hugely popular choice among us latecomers to the existence party. Milnesium tardigradum is found in all kinds of habitats, all around the world, and has gathered eloquent nominations from readers in France, the US, Canada and Britain. Whatever humanity hurls at them, the tardigrades will shrug it off and continue their plodding long after we are just a thin layer of plastic in the soil. So vote indestructibility, vote cute moss piglet, vote Milnesium tardigradum. Between 24 March and 2 April, we will be profiling a shortlist of 10 of the invertebrates chosen by readers and selected by our wildlife writers from more than 2,500 nominations. The voting for our 2025 invertebrate of the year will run from midday on Wednesday 2 April until midday on Friday 4 April, with the winner to be announced on Monday 7. Read the other fantastic nominations here.
