Traveling by snail is quicker than walking, if you are a tardigrade.
Eight-legged, endearingly tubby tardigrades can hitch rides on land snails to travel farther than they could on their own.
The slimy mucus coating on the snails proved fatal to tardigrade riders.
Tardigrades can be found in oceans, rivers and lakes, and in soggy clumps of moss and lichen on rocks and trees.
Extreme temperatures, crushing pressure, UV radiation, the vacuum of space and even being shot out of a high-speed gun are just some of the things that water bears can endure.
Tardigrades can survive punishing conditions and persist for years in this form, called a tun state, and some tardigrades that were frozen for 30 years were successfully resuscitated in 2016 and immediately began reproducing.
Researchers recently found that tun-state tardigrades could be picked up and carried by land that shared their habitats.
8 reasons why we love tardigrades.
tardigrades can swim and walk, but their legs don't carry them very far. A tardigrade in search of a new neighborhood needs outside assistance, such as wind, flowing water or an obliging host animal that is damp enough to keep the traveler alive.
Little is known about how tardigrades interact with snails in their natural habitats, but because water bears often live side by side with land snails, the researchers suspected that they could potentially be perfect vehicles for tardigrades.
The lead study author, Zofia Ksi, an assistant professor in the Institute of Environmental Biology at Adam Mickiewicz University, said that the topic was almost unexplored.
The only previous research on the subject was done more than 55 years ago.
The study authors collected grove snails and milnesium inceptum to test their hypothesis of hitchhiking tardigrade. The mollusks are good candidates for carrying tardigrades because of their large shells.
The scientists sent the snails crawling through drops of water and over pieces of moss to see how manypiglets they would pick up.
Active and tun-state tardigrades were easy to find on the bodies of the snails and they gathered 12 tardigrade riders from moss.
The only tardigrades that crossed that border did so with help from a snail and a vehicle, according to the study.
A tardigrade is in a moss cushion. The article is titled "Ksią" and it is written bykiewicz androszkowska. Rep.
Once the sticky mucus coating dried on the tardigrades, it was a deadly downside to the snails.
Only a small percentage of tuns that were coated in dried snail mucus could be revived. 98 percent of control group tuns that hadn't been slimed became active again once rehydrated.
mucus-coated tuns that were briefly revived by the water in snail mucus may not have been able to re-enter a state quickly enough as the slimy envelope around them hardened.
Other forces can carry tardigrades much farther than snails can, and prior studies have shown that wind gusts on glaciers can carry tardigrades over distances greater than 1,000 kilometers.
A tardigrade that rides the wind may end up in a place that is not very hospitable to water bears. A journey by snail is more likely to deposit its rider in an environment that is similar to the one where it started.
If tardigrade eggs can hitch a ride on snails, further experiments could show how far a tardigrade might travel by snail.
Even if the traveling tardigrade is just a few centimeters away, that is still enough to improve genetic diversity among different populations of water bears, according to the study.
If the tardigrade hitchhiking avoids being smothered by snail slime before its trip is over, that's all that's needed.
There are related content.
The best gifts for lovers of tardigrade.
There are 8 strange creatures on Earth.
The world's freakiest-looking animals are in photos.
The article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
