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Moss Piglet — printable fact sheet
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Animal Fact Sheet
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Moss Piglet
Hypsibius dujardini
Tardigrades — water bears, moss piglets — are half-millimetre invertebrates with eight legs tipped in claws, and their reputation for indestructibility is badly overstated. An active, hydrated tardigrade is a soft, vulnerable animal that a nematode can eat. What is extraordinary…
Did you know?
- Moss piglets can lose almost all the water in their bodies and remain dormant for decades, reviving once rehydrated.
- Tardigrades are eutelic: an adult has a fixed number of cells, roughly 1,000, and grows by making existing cells bigger rather than dividing more. A protein called Dsup, unique to tardigrades, physically shields their DNA from radiation damage, and inserting it into human cells in culture reduced X-ray damage by about 40 percent. In 2019 an Israeli lunar lander crashed on the Moon carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades; they were almost certainly still in tun state, but without water they cannot revive, so the Moon is not colonised.
What I learned
Draw the moss piglet
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