Speaker 1: You make time to move, to breathe, to check your stamina,
Speaker 1: your sleep, your steps. But when did you last look
Speaker 1: at health insurance for you or those you care about?
Speaker 1: With the Health Insurance Authority Comparison Tool, you can. It's quick,
Speaker 1: free and completely impartial. Compare every health insurance plan and
Speaker 1: find the right cover for you. The Health Insurance Authority
Speaker 1: time online spent well, make your next click count hateia
Speaker 1: do ie. The Health Insurance Authority is a REGULATORI body
Speaker 1: under the Government of Ireland.
Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's the sunglasses that you sat on, but
Speaker 2: you still wear crooked ali wort with a really big
Speaker 2: episode on a little creature. Let's get into it with
Speaker 2: a warning that this episode is an instant classic. I'm
Speaker 2: warning you you're going to listen to it more than
Speaker 2: once because it's so good and it's perfect prepare. So
Speaker 2: what is the tartar grade? You're about to find out
Speaker 2: more about these water bearer moss piglet tiny creatures with
Speaker 2: extreme survival abilities via the loving eyes of an expert
Speaker 2: Tartar gridologist who also identifies as a biophilist. Simply loves nature,
Speaker 2: loves critters, and is up to their eyes in wonder
Speaker 2: Their bio literally says to me, every life form, no
Speaker 2: matter how gruesome, think tapeworms, flukes, and the corpse flower
Speaker 2: of borneo is beautiful and awe inspiring. Oh, you're going
Speaker 2: to love them. So they got their bachelors and zoology
Speaker 2: in Southern Illinois, a master's in zoology at the University
Speaker 2: of the West Indies, and a biology PhD at UC
Speaker 2: Santa Cruz. They are currently a professor at Warren Wilson College.
Speaker 2: They have discovered many new species of tartar grade and
Speaker 2: is one of the foremost tartar gradologists on Earth. Just
Speaker 2: ps tartar gradeology. It's very much a field. It's an
Speaker 2: actual term, and you should know that tartar grade means
Speaker 2: slow stepper, just a tardi grader. They're tiny, they are rotund,
Speaker 2: and they saunter in no hurry. We're going to get
Speaker 2: to them swiftly, but first a head's up to back
Speaker 2: to schoolers. We launched a new show a few months
Speaker 2: back on its own feed. Smologies used to be in
Speaker 2: this feed, but we gave it its own home, so
Speaker 2: you can look fir Asmologies wherever you get podcasts, or
Speaker 2: check the link in the show notes. Subscribe to that
Speaker 2: one too, in case you have littles and you need
Speaker 2: kid friendly versions of Ologies Classics that are classroom and
Speaker 2: all ages safe. Also, thank you to patrons at patreon
Speaker 2: dot com slash Ologies for submitting your questions and supporting
Speaker 2: the show for as little as a dollar a month.
Speaker 2: Ologies merch is available at ologiesmarch dot com. We have
Speaker 2: backpacks and college sweaters and toads and hats and such. Also,
Speaker 2: thank you for leaving reviews for zero dollars. Thank you
Speaker 2: to everyone who does. I read them all, including this
Speaker 2: just left one from Ivacnaird, who wrote, you make it
Speaker 2: interesting regardless of subject, it is all interesting and we
Speaker 2: just didn't know until you showed us. Oh. I have
Speaker 2: a lot of gratitude for that. And thank you for
Speaker 2: all the reviews anyone who's left one. They held this
Speaker 2: show so much. And here we go into the episode Saunter,
Speaker 2: into a microscopic wonderland of weird business about mystery maps
Speaker 2: that last longer than you can imagine, how a loaf
Speaker 2: of a critter can deal with a vacuum of space,
Speaker 2: how to find and marvel at Tartar grades, the experiments
Speaker 2: involving their survival Moon landings, cryptobiosis, biodiversity, kitten claws, knife mouths,
Speaker 2: their sexual prowess aka the tntra grade, life splicing their
Speaker 2: DNA into ours, spiders on Mars, flimflam, and so much more.
Speaker 2: With a Creature of Wonder, Professor Zoologist and your new
Speaker 2: friend and confirmed tartar gradologist, doctor Paul Bartles.
Speaker 3: I always am ready to talk about tartar grains. Paul Bartles,
Speaker 3: he doctor tartigrade.
Speaker 2: Do a lot of people in your life casually, like
Speaker 2: your neighbors and stuff. Do they know what you study?
Speaker 2: Or are you just like, oh, Paul, the cool guy
Speaker 2: that lives next door.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of them do. I'm the tartar grade guy.
Speaker 2: When do you remember seeing your first tartar grade? I've
Speaker 2: never seen one in person, But do you remember when
Speaker 2: you saw yours?
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I mean I saw pictures of
Speaker 3: them in my zoology class in college, but I never
Speaker 3: saw a live one. I don't think I ever saw
Speaker 3: a live one. I don't think I was a successful
Speaker 3: finding them until I actually worked with somebody who helped
Speaker 3: me learn how to collect them and study them, and
Speaker 3: so I would have been around the year two thousand
Speaker 3: when I started studying them myself. You're kind of elusive
Speaker 3: if you don't know the tricks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, that's a huge question on my mind is
Speaker 2: how do you find them? I guess first I should
Speaker 2: ask you to describe two people. What is a tartar grade.
Speaker 2: Some people will know this word and get thrilled, and
Speaker 2: some people will be like, do I skip this episode?
Speaker 2: What even is it?
Speaker 3: Going to love this?
Speaker 2: What is it?
Speaker 3: Tarti grades are microscopic animals. They're complex, multicelled, but microscopic animals,
Speaker 3: and they are in their own pilum. The kingdom an
Speaker 3: Amalia is divided into about thirty or so phila. They're
Speaker 3: their own phylum about four teen hundred species, and their
Speaker 3: characteristics are that they have five body segments, four pairs
Speaker 3: of little stubby legs, and they have a cuticle that
Speaker 3: they have to mold when they grow, like nematodes and
Speaker 3: arthropods because they're related to them. And they have these
Speaker 3: paired stylets that are like little hypodermic needles that they
Speaker 3: can poke out their mouths. And so that's the general
Speaker 3: characteristic of tarte grades. And the thing that they're famous
Speaker 3: for is being champion animal survivors. That's probably what people
Speaker 3: know about them, if they know about tartar grades.
Speaker 2: Fourteen hundred species. If you would have asked me, I
Speaker 2: would have thought, oh, you know how, there's maybe eight
Speaker 2: species of bear. There's like a lower number than you
Speaker 2: would think.
Speaker 3: And probably why you think that is because on the internet,
Speaker 3: the meme for tartar grades is this one image that's everywhere,
Speaker 3: and it is one species, and so you kind of think, oh, well,
Speaker 3: it's they all look like that.
Speaker 2: So you may have seen an electron microscopy portrait of
Speaker 2: what appears to be an inflated leaping bag with small
Speaker 2: baguettes for legs and a barbed wire vape pen for
Speaker 2: a mouth, or perhaps you saw an animation based on
Speaker 2: that photo and it looked like a flying chod with
Speaker 2: eight stumpy appendages and a garbage disposal for a face,
Speaker 2: And perhaps you feel grateful that they are microscopic, but.
Speaker 3: In fact that meme is not a great meme. All
Speaker 3: we can talk about that if you want, Oh, yeah, brother.
Speaker 2: Why is that not a representative of the tartar grad family.
Speaker 2: And also I wonder if that one particular tartar grade
Speaker 2: that's scanning electron microscope image. If that Tartar Grade knows
Speaker 2: how famous it is, like that is the most famous
Speaker 2: microscopic animal on the planet. What is that image? It
Speaker 2: looks like it has a hell mouth. It looks like
Speaker 2: it has the poato sarlac as of mouth. And one
Speaker 2: patron described it as like a floating baked potato with legs.
Speaker 2: They look like floppy baked potatoes, quoth patron Megan Walker.
Speaker 2: But it is that image. Where did it come from?
Speaker 3: That is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it,
Speaker 3: because that image is everywhere on the internet. It drives
Speaker 3: me nuts because it's so wrong. In fact, I'll show you.
Speaker 3: I've got a little toy here. Oh it's a little
Speaker 3: night light. Everybody needs one of these.
Speaker 4: Oh it's lovely Tarti grade nightlight.
Speaker 3: And another little Tartar Grade squeeze toy for anxiety. We
Speaker 3: all need those, yes, in this day and age. But
Speaker 3: they all look exactly like that, right, This is what
Speaker 3: they all look like.
Speaker 2: Yep, modeled after that famous internet imagery that.
Speaker 3: Is so wrong. It is so messed up. It is
Speaker 3: so messed up. My kids would say it's fed up.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say that on the air, but you know
Speaker 3: they weren't raised, right. But yeah, So this image, the
Speaker 3: one I'm thinking of, is a animated image. They took
Speaker 3: that scanny electron microscope image and they made an animated
Speaker 3: image out of it with computer generated graphic, and it
Speaker 3: shows this happy little tartar grade swimming along in the water.
Speaker 3: It's kind of bright pink, and it's got this mouth
Speaker 3: that's poking out and then alternately sucking back in, forming
Speaker 3: like this giant anus head thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, is
Speaker 3: that what you're talking about? Yep, yep, ye, yep, that's
Speaker 3: that's what these that's what these little toys showed, the
Speaker 3: anus hit.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep.
Speaker 3: It's disgusting.
Speaker 2: Is that not what they look like?
Speaker 3: It's disgusting. No, that's not what they look like.
Speaker 2: Really, wow, what are their faces usually doing?
Speaker 3: So that image, let me count the ways it's messed up. Okay.
Speaker 3: First of all, they're not pink. They're not pink.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: I think somebody thought most piglet, which is one of
Speaker 3: their common names, and thought, well, if it's pig lit,
Speaker 3: I guess it's pink. But it's not that kind of
Speaker 3: tartar Grade is usually white or clearish. Sometimes some darker pigments,
Speaker 3: but never pink. They don't swim, oh, they're been thick.
Speaker 3: Tartar grades crawl on the bottom, and so if you
Speaker 3: drop the tartar grade in the water, it would flail
Speaker 3: its legs helplessly and fall to the bottom. And the
Speaker 3: claws are all wrong on those images.
Speaker 2: So the popular animation depicts them with kitten claws at
Speaker 2: the tips of each michelin man leg And.
Speaker 3: This is the way you can tell if it's an
Speaker 3: anatomically correct image. Okay, So on tartar grades, they have
Speaker 3: four pairs of legs. The first three pairs of legs
Speaker 3: are all oriented the same. The fourth pair of legs
Speaker 3: comes out the very rear of the body and is
Speaker 3: oddly turned around at one hundred and eighty degrees relative
Speaker 3: to the first three. Those computer generated images are never
Speaker 3: right about that. That's the way to check. Yeah, And
Speaker 3: the worst thing is that mouth thing. So they do
Speaker 3: not live. Animals don't. Their heads don't cave in to
Speaker 3: form an anus head. They just don't do that. They
Speaker 3: have this cuticle that's kind of continuous around their head
Speaker 3: and body, and so that's relatively rigid. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of move going on in the mouth, but that's internal.
Speaker 3: You don't see it in the head.
Speaker 2: How did we get it so wrong?
Speaker 3: I think what happened is that those scanning electron microscope
Speaker 3: images that you are talking about, they're so beautiful, and
Speaker 3: they're also everywhere on the internet. Some of those show
Speaker 3: the head normally, some of them the heads contracted. That's
Speaker 3: an artifact of preparation for scanning electron microscopy, and so
Speaker 3: I think the animators saw both of those images and
Speaker 3: just thought, well, okay, if it's moving around, it must
Speaker 3: alternate between those two. That's my conjecture of how that
Speaker 3: got to be like that. I'm sorry, that's just wrong.
Speaker 3: But the head of Tarte Grays is nicely, smoothly round
Speaker 3: or maybe tapered forward. It never caves in like that.
Speaker 3: The internal mouthparts are beautiful. They have a mouth, They
Speaker 3: have a bugle tube that's kind of like ar esophagus.
Speaker 3: It ends in a punching bag like pharynx, and then
Speaker 3: that goes into a stomach and intestine. Pharynx has muscles
Speaker 3: attached and it's going like this all the time, going
Speaker 3: in and out to form suction like the bulb of
Speaker 3: an eye dropper. The silts are poking in and out
Speaker 3: all the time. All that stuff's going on in sort
Speaker 3: of beautifully complex motion, but it's all inside the animal.
Speaker 4: You don't see that unreal.
Speaker 3: So another reason I hate that image is because people
Speaker 3: that look at it and say, oh, well, there must
Speaker 3: just be this one kind. Yes, but there's several different
Speaker 3: kinds of tartar grades. They come in several flavors, and
Speaker 3: there's a lot of diversity among the individual species. And
Speaker 3: so that one image is the image that almost always
Speaker 3: gets displayed. But it's not. I don't even think it's
Speaker 3: the coolest one. The best ones. The best ones in
Speaker 3: like pop culture would be if you ask me, I,
Speaker 3: do have you seen ant Man in WASP?
Speaker 2: No, I haven't seen it. There's tartar grades in it.
Speaker 3: Oh, there's tartar grades in both the ant Man movies.
Speaker 3: And in the first one it's a cameo appearance. In
Speaker 3: the second one they have a really major role. They
Speaker 3: almost eat Michael Douglas. It's very scary. In case they
Speaker 3: don't make it.
Speaker 2: I don't say that.
Speaker 5: I can't lose you too.
Speaker 2: I love you, hope. So did they do it right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And the tartar grade scene in ant Man and
Speaker 3: the Loss, the second one, they're the other kind of
Speaker 3: tartar grade. They're not like the one that's all over
Speaker 3: the internet, and they're actually very well done, except for
Speaker 3: the fact that they're swimming. But at least they don't
Speaker 3: have an anocent.
Speaker 2: Do they call up tartar gridologists and say, hey, how
Speaker 2: can we make sure that we do this right?
Speaker 3: They must have, because at least in that show they did,
Speaker 3: because those are really well done. So they must have
Speaker 3: talked to somebody I don't know who.
Speaker 2: Next time, give you a holler, give you a jingle, yeah,
Speaker 2: invite you to the premiere. Also, can you describe also
Speaker 2: their scale? Are they all super super tiny or do
Speaker 2: they vary in size?
Speaker 3: They do very in size, but in a very small
Speaker 3: size range. We say they're microscopic. And so what we
Speaker 3: mean by that you have to think small. You have
Speaker 3: to think about a small size scale. So think about
Speaker 3: the foot long ruler you had in grade school. Flip
Speaker 3: it over to the metric side. It's divided into thirty centimeters,
Speaker 3: and then each of those is divided into the tiny
Speaker 3: little marks. Those are the millimeters. One millimeter is about
Speaker 3: the size of the period at the end of a sentence.
Speaker 3: You read this all the time in my crossy stuff,
Speaker 3: and I actually measured it's true period. It's about the
Speaker 3: size of one millimeter. The largest tartar grades can get
Speaker 3: to be about one millimeter in length, the size of
Speaker 3: that period. But those are the tous you know, tous
Speaker 3: like rodents of unusual size.
Speaker 2: Tartar grades of unusual size.
Speaker 3: Yes, I actually use that in a research paper. It's
Speaker 3: been published.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. I fact check this and the man is
Speaker 2: not lying. You can see his twenty nineteen Zoological Journal
Speaker 2: of the Linae and Society paper Altitudinal Gradients and Body
Speaker 2: Size and Marine tartar Grade, which contains the sentence quote.
Speaker 2: We did not find a significant increase in maximum body
Speaker 2: size with latitude. Therefore this is not responsible for body size,
Speaker 2: latitudinal gradients and marine tartargrades. But we examined our database
Speaker 2: to find out whether there are polar tartigrades of unusual
Speaker 2: size touss with our apologies to the princess bride end quote.
Speaker 2: This is how you publish papers, folks.
Speaker 3: Yes, those are the tartar grades of unusual size. So
Speaker 3: for a period at the end of sins you can
Speaker 3: see it with your naked eye. Of course, right the
Speaker 3: largest tartar grades could be seen with the naked eye,
Speaker 3: but you wouldn't even know they're a tartar grade. They're
Speaker 3: just a spec magnify them to study them. And there
Speaker 3: are a whole lot of tartar grades that are much
Speaker 3: smaller than that. So at the other end of the
Speaker 3: size scale, the tiny end of the tartar grade size scale,
Speaker 3: we have to have another unit of measure that's smaller.
Speaker 3: So if you take that millimeter or that period at
Speaker 3: the end of sens and you divide it a thousand times,
Speaker 3: one of those units asand of a millimeter is a
Speaker 3: micrometer or micron. The smallest adult Charte grades that I've
Speaker 3: measured are between thirty five and forty microns. And to
Speaker 3: put that into perspective, that's about half the width of
Speaker 3: a human hair. Oh tiny, and you can't see that
Speaker 3: with your naked eye. Teeny tiny. Here's another thing to
Speaker 3: think about about life at small size scales. We have
Speaker 3: this huge gap in our biodiversity knowledge, and it's the
Speaker 3: gap between the number of known species currently and the
Speaker 3: total species that are on earth, including all those You
Speaker 3: have to be discovered. That gap is called the Linnaean
Speaker 3: shortfall after Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth century naturalists who came
Speaker 3: up with our system of classification we still use. So
Speaker 3: one end of that gap, that huge gap between the
Speaker 3: number known and the number not known, is the number
Speaker 3: of known species. So you want to take a guess
Speaker 3: at that, how many known species there currently are? How
Speaker 3: many described?
Speaker 2: Oh? Man, because there's I know, there's like three hundred
Speaker 2: thousand of just beetles or something, right, but they're really
Speaker 2: four thousand mammals.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, you're a bunkers, you know this.
Speaker 2: No, I would guess like half a million.
Speaker 3: There's almost a million insects species.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Okay, as a bug lover, a million
Speaker 2: bugs thrills me. But what about all the species ever
Speaker 2: on earth combined?
Speaker 3: According to the IUCN, which is the group that keeps
Speaker 3: track of endangered species, they say we're a little bit
Speaker 3: over two million named species right now. But that's a guess.
Speaker 3: And it's a guess because not all museum collections are digitized,
Speaker 3: and if they are, they don't all talk to one another.
Speaker 3: The databases don't talk to one another, so it's a
Speaker 3: big bioinformatics problem, and we're always describing new species, so
Speaker 3: it's a moving target. But we'll just go with two
Speaker 3: million for now. And so at the other end of
Speaker 3: the continuum is the total number of species, including all
Speaker 3: those you have to be discovered. So if we don't
Speaker 3: know how many we know, we certainly don't know how
Speaker 3: many we don't know. Guesses on that range really widely.
Speaker 3: But to make a long story short, one estimate you
Speaker 3: see a lot is nine million total species on Earth.
Speaker 3: So that's the line in shortfall. Two million known, nine
Speaker 3: million unknown. Both of those numbers are huge guesses, but
Speaker 3: it's clear we have a giant line in shortfall. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of life we don't know. The larger the species,
Speaker 3: the more we already know, the fewer there are yet
Speaker 3: to be discovered. And at the other end, when we
Speaker 3: look at the microscopic range, especially, the reverse is true.
Speaker 3: The fewer we know now and there are vast numbers
Speaker 3: yet to be described. So life is mostly small, and
Speaker 3: all those microbes and all those tiny little plants and
Speaker 3: animals literally run the world. So I'm glad we're doing
Speaker 3: this episode. Maybe it'll open door for other episodes about
Speaker 3: microscopic organisms, because that tiny, tiny little world's huge.
Speaker 2: For more on this, you can look into our biology
Speaker 2: episode on Moss, which is excellent with Braiding Sweetgrass author
Speaker 2: doctor Robin Wall Kimmerer. We also have a plenaria episode
Speaker 2: with doctor one Pegahan and other teeny critters that we're
Speaker 2: going to link in the show notes. Did you start
Speaker 2: loving science from that tiny level or did you start
Speaker 2: with like I love cheetahs and charismatic megafauna, and then
Speaker 2: get smaller and smaller? Like what was your entry point?
Speaker 3: Let's see, I got interested in biology through water. I
Speaker 3: was one of those water rat kids, and somehow, growing
Speaker 3: up in southern Illinois about as far away from the
Speaker 3: ocean as you can possibly get, I got infatuated with
Speaker 3: oceans and scuba diving. And I think the scuba diving
Speaker 3: part was because of an old TV show called Sea Hunt.
Speaker 2: Oh I've heard of it.
Speaker 3: Yes, Lloyd Bridges played Mike Nelson, and every week there
Speaker 3: was another daring do underwater and so cool. What's the
Speaker 3: matter with you? You want to sit out here in
Speaker 3: this raft all night? No, but we might have to,
Speaker 3: well not if you do something. So anyway, I got
Speaker 3: interested in my first love in biology was marine biology
Speaker 3: and coral Reefy College, and on coral reefs, the dominant
Speaker 3: animals are invertebrates, so I immediately started studying invertebrates. And
Speaker 3: then I learned about tartar grades when I took my
Speaker 3: first zoology course and thought they were cool. I now
Speaker 3: call them charismatic microfauna. I love that, you know, cute
Speaker 3: and cuddley and champion animal survivors. What's not to love.
Speaker 3: But I didn't start studying them until about the year
Speaker 3: two thousand. I would teach my classes about them, but
Speaker 3: we never could find them. And around the year two thousand,
Speaker 3: I was looking for new research directions, and I was
Speaker 3: looking for things that would attract undergraduate research interests because
Speaker 3: that's who I supervise and research stuff. And I heard
Speaker 3: about the All Taxibiodiversity Inventory, the ATBI that was starting
Speaker 3: up in the Smokeyes Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which
Speaker 3: is just an hour drive from Warren Wilson College, and
Speaker 3: I knew they were looking for p able to study
Speaker 3: unstudied groups. I knew tartar grades were one of those groups.
Speaker 3: I also knew that I was not a taxonomic expert
Speaker 3: on tartar grades. But the part biologists were able to
Speaker 3: put me in touch with Diane Nelson, who is a
Speaker 3: professor at East Tennessee State University, and so she became
Speaker 3: my mentor in tartar grade ology and we still are
Speaker 3: great friends and we continue to collaborate. With Diane's help
Speaker 3: and with the whole army of Warren Wilson students, we
Speaker 3: did a large scale inventory in the Smokies.
Speaker 2: By large scale, he means large.
Speaker 3: Scale, and it ended up taking ten years. It was
Speaker 3: one of the largest inventories of tartar grades ever done,
Speaker 3: and it was really successful at giving my students dozens
Speaker 3: and dozens of research projects. We took the number of
Speaker 3: known tartar grades in the park from zero to eighty five,
Speaker 3: including twenty five new to science.
Speaker 2: Nice nice work.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: We published a ton of papers and I finally developed
Speaker 3: some expertise with that group of animals. And you know,
Speaker 3: at least now I can find them.
Speaker 2: I can't wait to get to tips. I should ask
Speaker 2: first when it comes to what tartar grades are doing
Speaker 2: in the universe, because they do run the world. What
Speaker 2: are they eating, what are they pooping? Where are they living?
Speaker 2: You said that they're benthic. Do they live in completely
Speaker 2: aquatic environments or do they live as they're called moss
Speaker 2: piglets or water bears. Are they in the moss? Are
Speaker 2: they in the water? Do the fourteen hundred species live
Speaker 2: in different places?
Speaker 3: They live in different places. They all live in moist
Speaker 3: sediments basically, even if they're temporarily moist, So they live
Speaker 3: in ocean sediments both deep and shallow and on the beach.
Speaker 3: They live in aquatic sediments like in freshwater habitats, streams
Speaker 3: and ponds, and especially they're really abundant in the periphytin.
Speaker 3: It's the green scus that grows on rocks and plants
Speaker 3: in ponds, And they occur in temporarily moist areas like
Speaker 3: moss and lichens and soil, the grid on your gut,
Speaker 3: or anything that's got something for them to hide in
Speaker 3: and is at least temporarily moist, and they do all
Speaker 3: kinds of things. There are some that are carnivores that
Speaker 3: are eating other microscopic animals in their world. There are
Speaker 3: some that are herbivores that are eating algae or sometimes
Speaker 3: the moss tissue that they live in. There are some
Speaker 3: that are detritivores or microbivores sucking up the substrate, and
Speaker 3: there's some that are omnivores, and you can sometimes tell
Speaker 3: that from their mouthparts. Those with really robust mouthparts are predators.
Speaker 3: Those with really thin light mouthparts are probably herbivores. And
Speaker 3: those that have like a vacuum hose for mouthparts can
Speaker 3: bend their mouth down and kind of suck up the bottom.
Speaker 3: Those are the detritivors. And you can sometimes do gut
Speaker 3: contents analysis. You can look at them through the microscope,
Speaker 3: and for example, you can see when a predator's been
Speaker 3: eating other animals. You can see the hard parts of
Speaker 3: those animals in their guts.
Speaker 2: Take a moment, if you will, to a map X
Speaker 2: ray vision into your guts right now. Mine would be
Speaker 2: stale granola and yeah, a tin of smoked oysters. Also,
Speaker 2: for more on seeing into your own guts, please enjoy
Speaker 2: the radiology episode on X ray vision. And we also
Speaker 2: have a microbiology episode on how your own zoo of
Speaker 2: bowel animals affects your vibe. Also, I have a field
Speaker 2: trip episode about a kolonoscopy prep. So you're welcome. Don't
Speaker 2: turn your nose up. You're going to need one one day,
Speaker 2: speaking of do they have eyes or noses? How are
Speaker 2: they finding their prey?
Speaker 3: That is a great question. Some tartar grades have eye spots,
Speaker 3: some don't. We know that at least some of them
Speaker 3: are negatively phototactic. They can move away from light, and
Speaker 3: so they probably probably most tartar grades have eyes. But
Speaker 3: here's the cool thing about this. So the ones that
Speaker 3: have eyes have these some of them have big, dark
Speaker 3: eyes and they're very cute looking. So we always were thinking, well,
Speaker 3: what are the pigments in these eyes? You know, we
Speaker 3: still don't know what the pigments are. But a student
Speaker 3: in Germany, a PhD student in Germany just a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago, published this cool paper where she was
Speaker 3: looking at the ultrastructure of eyes and what she found
Speaker 3: was that and we always knew that the eyes, the
Speaker 3: pigments were actually on the brain itself, it was part
Speaker 3: of the brain. So what she found was that, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's true, but those pigment eye spots are not innervated.
Speaker 4: What does that mean.
Speaker 3: There's no nerves running from them to the brain, and
Speaker 3: underneath them are two different kinds of light sensor cells
Speaker 3: that we know from other invertebrate animals that are the
Speaker 3: light sensors. So it raises the question, well, what are
Speaker 3: the pigments for. What are they doing with those things
Speaker 3: over their eyes? It's like wearing sunglasses. Why do you
Speaker 3: bother having eyes if you're going to put sunglasses. I guess,
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't really know. She had an idea.
Speaker 3: We know they go away from light. Well, her thought
Speaker 3: was that maybe it's creating shades so that the light
Speaker 3: gets shaded when it comes from one side, so that
Speaker 3: they can tell which site it's coming from, which I
Speaker 3: thought was a really cool idea.
Speaker 2: Well, what about their brains? You mentioned them, so they
Speaker 2: do have little tiny brains. How big is their brains?
Speaker 2: What are they doing with them?
Speaker 6: They have?
Speaker 3: They have a fair sized brain and average sized brain
Speaker 3: for a tiny you know, when you scale down their
Speaker 3: body size, they have an average sized brain for a
Speaker 3: invertebrate animal. Their sensory depending on the species, they have
Speaker 3: various sensors coming in from the head and from some
Speaker 3: other as a body sometimes, and so they're responding to those.
Speaker 3: They're responding to light. They're helping them orient their sensing smells,
Speaker 3: like males can orient to females based on the smell,
Speaker 3: They're running their mouth parts and their muscles, you know,
Speaker 3: So it's doing all the stuff that brains do.
Speaker 2: How are they reproducing? I didn't even think about that.
Speaker 2: They seem just so gender neutral in the images that
Speaker 2: I can think of. But how are they finding each other?
Speaker 2: Are they having litters to the hafteny tiny nipples? What's
Speaker 2: going on?
Speaker 3: Okay, So there are fourteen hundred species, so there's some
Speaker 3: diversity in their reproduction. And there's one species that I
Speaker 3: know of that's hermaphroditic and probably self fertile, we think,
Speaker 3: but we don't really know.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 2: According to the twenty fourteen study titled Spermatozoa in the
Speaker 2: Reproductive System of a hermaphroditic marine, tartar grade or Zealiscus
Speaker 2: belopus O. Belopus is a simultaneous hermaphrodite and suggests that
Speaker 2: the reproductive mode includes copulation and cross fertilization, which means
Speaker 2: it's got both bits, but it still likes to get
Speaker 2: it on with others. Also fun side note. The species
Speaker 2: was first described by Eveline du Bois Raymond Marcus, who
Speaker 2: was a German zoologist and artist who moved to Brazil
Speaker 2: at the rise of Nazism because her husband, another zoologist,
Speaker 2: was Jewish, so they've fled the country. She co wrote
Speaker 2: a lot of his papers, but if she got credit,
Speaker 2: then he wouldn't get paid, so she was kind of
Speaker 2: like on the DL, really good at her job. Also,
Speaker 2: you should know that there are three main flavors of
Speaker 2: tartar grades. There are the U tartar grades, which are
Speaker 2: primarily freshwater bound. They are the heterotardeic grades, whose genies
Speaker 2: have their own prenal gonopore instead of using the butthole
Speaker 2: like the Utarta gratta. And then there are a third kind.
Speaker 2: These are what Paul calls the Yeti of the water
Speaker 2: bearer world. Do they exist? They are mezo tarta grades, which,
Speaker 2: if you ask our pal Workipedia, mezzo Tarta grade is
Speaker 2: represented by a single species known from a single specimen
Speaker 2: found in a hot spring in Nagasaki, Japan. And that
Speaker 2: one single specimen is now lost. Go back to the
Speaker 2: location check for more. We can't because the location from
Speaker 2: which that specimen was collected has since been destroyed by
Speaker 2: an earthquake, so its reproductive anatomy has not been studied recently.
Speaker 2: Did it ever exist or was the person who found
Speaker 2: it just mislabeling a different one that was already described.
Speaker 2: If we build a time machine, can we go hot
Speaker 2: tub and look forward again? How many are out there
Speaker 2: that humans haven't found? And we'll never find mysteries abound?
Speaker 3: Let's get sexy, and then at least half, maybe most
Speaker 3: of the rest of them have separate sexes and reproduce sexually.
Speaker 3: So males and females reproduce sexually. And then there's some
Speaker 3: other ones that we've never found males, and we know
Speaker 3: that the females can produce all daughter offspring, and so
Speaker 3: they're reproducing asexually, but we also know they can switch
Speaker 3: between those things. And there was a Japanese researcher had
Speaker 3: a culture of asexually reproducing species going for generations, all females,
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden the male popped up and
Speaker 3: they made it. So they probably can go back and
Speaker 3: forth at least occasionally. And some species males are almost
Speaker 3: equal to them females, so there's a variation in sex
Speaker 3: ratio and this whole switch between a sexuality and sexuality.
Speaker 2: So yes, females tend to be more numerous than males,
Speaker 2: and even in some populations that pomp out bibiz with
Speaker 2: no males, a male might pop up. Now, other species
Speaker 2: of tarte grades have co ed existences, and apparently there
Speaker 2: is flirting that happens right now in a slimy gutter
Speaker 2: near you. There are teeny creatures that have more riz
Speaker 2: than you do.
Speaker 3: And me in the sexually reproducing when. There's been a
Speaker 3: couple of papers describing mating behavior in the last few years,
Speaker 3: and it's pretty cool. In one of them, it's pretty weird. Actually.
Speaker 3: This was a German team that had a culture of
Speaker 3: sexually reproducing species going and they were able to videotape
Speaker 3: them well okay, and what they saw was that the
Speaker 3: males were attracted to females who had eggs, and they
Speaker 3: figured it was most likely pheromonal and the male. When
Speaker 3: the male found the female, he would wrap his body
Speaker 3: around her head and the female. They saw the female
Speaker 3: using her stilts to poke out into the belly of
Speaker 3: the male and they presume that was stimulating him. And
Speaker 3: then he ejaculated multiple times for over an hour what
Speaker 3: and at the head, so the the sperm was released
Speaker 3: at the head, and so these researchers thought, well, that
Speaker 3: must have been you know, just an a barren observation
Speaker 3: or maybe a confused male. But they ended up seeing
Speaker 3: thirty different matings and it was the same every time.
Speaker 3: And then another study came out after that with a
Speaker 3: different species and they made it like you would think
Speaker 3: it was cloaca to cloaca like birds, like chloaqal kiss
Speaker 3: from a bird. And so my thought on that is,
Speaker 3: maybe it's such a tiny little distance for sperm to
Speaker 3: travel they don't care where they release it.
Speaker 2: Wild wild Can it get into the reproductive system orally?
Speaker 3: That's a great question, and that's one possibility. They never
Speaker 3: really saw where the sperm was going in. But what
Speaker 3: happens in that particular species when the female as egg
Speaker 3: she kind of scrunches her body up inside the cuticle,
Speaker 3: So you see the big empty cuticle, and she's kind
Speaker 3: of scrunched up, and she starts to deposit her eggs
Speaker 3: inside that cuticle. So the front half of her kind
Speaker 3: of crawling around and the back half is filled with eggs.
Speaker 3: And at that point there's two openings into the body
Speaker 3: into the cuticle. One would be the mouth and one
Speaker 3: would be the cloaca, And so it could have gone
Speaker 3: in either way, but it got in because it had
Speaker 3: to furtilize the eggs inside the cuticle, so it had
Speaker 3: to get in somehow, So.
Speaker 2: Really just use either door.
Speaker 3: Hold up.
Speaker 2: What is with this overcoat? Though, Let's talk about the cuticle.
Speaker 2: Is that cuticle squishy like a water balloon or is
Speaker 2: it kind of rigid or can they change it depending
Speaker 2: on the external conditions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's some flexibility. Some places are thicker than others
Speaker 3: and are more rigid than others, so they have the
Speaker 3: ability to bend here and there. But generally speaking their
Speaker 3: semi rigid like a cicada shell. Okay, but microscoptic.
Speaker 2: How on Earth or how in space can these little wigglers?
Speaker 2: How are they surviving desiccated for years? How can they
Speaker 2: survive in the vacuum of space? What is going on
Speaker 2: with these very resilient, little, tiny little bad asses.
Speaker 3: This is the tartar Grade claim to fame. It's a
Speaker 3: single most studied aspect of their biology. So we could
Speaker 3: talk about this for a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The way they survive not just drying out, but all
Speaker 3: kinds of environmental extremes, including space exposure, which we need
Speaker 3: to talk about, is they go into an inactive resting
Speaker 3: state called cryptobiosis, which literally means hidden life. And in
Speaker 3: this state, they have no measurable water in their bodies,
Speaker 3: they have no gas exchange going on, no energy usage.
Speaker 3: They're dead, except they can come back to life. Spooky,
Speaker 3: and when they're in that condition, they are incredibly resilient.
Speaker 3: There's been all these experiments where they expose them to
Speaker 3: different extremes and see what kind of survival there is.
Speaker 3: And they've survived complete drying out, complete vacuum temperatures over
Speaker 3: three hundred degrees fahrenheit, temperatures down to almost minus three
Speaker 3: hundred degrees fahrenheit, really high levels of radiation like twenty
Speaker 3: times the estimated maximum dose from the Nagasaki bomb, and
Speaker 3: much higher pressures than you would experience at the Marianna Strench.
Speaker 2: So they can survive really high pressure, low pressure vacuums,
Speaker 2: extreme temperatures, radiation, and dehydration like nothing. You can imagine.
Speaker 2: You're never going to catch a tartar grade with the hydroflask,
Speaker 2: don't eat it.
Speaker 3: So incredibly resilient and oh you might think about those experiments,
Speaker 3: they're kind of evil scientist stuff from a tartar grade
Speaker 3: point of view. One of them, one recent experiment shot
Speaker 3: a mautic guns into sandbags to see what kind of
Speaker 3: impact they could take.
Speaker 2: What they do.
Speaker 3: They didn't do very well with that. Okay, a little
Speaker 3: tartar grades. I want all the tartar grades listening to know.
Speaker 3: I've never done these experiments either way. So they didn't
Speaker 3: do very well with that experiment. But they're incredibly resilient
Speaker 3: to pretty much every environmental extreme we can throw at them,
Speaker 3: and as you mentioned, they can do it for many,
Speaker 3: many years. And this is even to me more mind blowing.
Speaker 3: Our understanding of how long they can withstand environmental extremes
Speaker 3: has changed over time. We used to say it was
Speaker 3: about one hundred years. They could live maybe one hundred years,
Speaker 3: and that was because some people found some moss in
Speaker 3: a museum that was one hundred years old and they
Speaker 3: extracted tartar grades, and they said that they got the
Speaker 3: animals to come out of cryptobiosis. Later people said, yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe they just saw movement when the animal filled with water.
Speaker 3: Turns out, it's not real easy to tell the difference
Speaker 3: between a cryptobiotic live turtar grade and a cryptobiotic dead
Speaker 3: tartar grade. So we kind of dropped back from that
Speaker 3: and then somebody found some samples that were thirty five
Speaker 3: years old and they definitely got resuscitation. So we've been
Speaker 3: saying recently that we know they can live at least decades,
Speaker 3: but I have a prediction that we will soon know
Speaker 3: that they can live tens of thousands of years.
Speaker 2: What how?
Speaker 3: And the reason I'll say that is because there have
Speaker 3: been two papers published in the last three years that
Speaker 3: found other cryptobiotic animals in ice cores from Siberian permafrost.
Speaker 3: These were both papers published from Russia, and they brought
Speaker 3: those animals back to the lab and they thought them out,
Speaker 3: and they moved and they reproduced. So I think it's
Speaker 3: fair to say that they were alive.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, long nap immediate boning. Every day is vacation
Speaker 2: day for a tartar grade. But how long was this nap?
Speaker 2: So in an email after this chat, Paul wrote me,
Speaker 2: how long can they survive in cryptobiosis? Indirect evidence of
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of years? For exclamation points for well
Speaker 2: earned exclamation points, And he elaborates on those Siberian ice
Speaker 2: core resurrections.
Speaker 3: And one of those was dated to twenty five thousand
Speaker 3: years ago, and one of them was dated to forty
Speaker 3: six thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: The cores or the tartar grades themselves.
Speaker 3: Both the ice cores were dated that long, and so
Speaker 3: we know that animals were there from that period of
Speaker 3: time as well. We had no idea they could live
Speaker 3: that long, and so this was really mind blowing. And
Speaker 3: tartar grades have at least as sophisticated of cryptobiotic machinery
Speaker 3: as do the other animals that were found in these cores.
Speaker 3: Those other animals were rotifers and nematodes. So I think
Speaker 3: it's just a matter of time before we find tartar
Speaker 3: grades in those ice cores as well.
Speaker 2: Do we have any idea and by we, I'm using
Speaker 2: I'm including myself in this because I would like to be.
Speaker 2: I wish I were a tartar gridologist. Dude, that royal.
Speaker 2: We have any idea how on earth they can survive that?
Speaker 2: And what kind of implications does that have for mortality
Speaker 2: in general?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's a good question. Yes, we
Speaker 3: do have some idea how they do cryptobiosis. And before
Speaker 3: I tell you that, though, I need to give a
Speaker 3: little qualification to how tough they are. You know, sometimes
Speaker 3: because of this ability to stand all these conditions for
Speaker 3: so long. Tartar grades are called the toughest animals on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I think of when I think of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I agree with that, but with two qualifications
Speaker 3: that are I think important. One is that not all
Speaker 3: Tartar grades are cryptobiotic. They're fourteen hundred species. Cryptobiosis is
Speaker 3: a trick of the terrestrial Tartar grades, the ones in
Speaker 3: mosses and lichens. It's what allowed them to colonize terrestrial habitats.
Speaker 3: The truly aquatic, either freshwater or marine ones don't have
Speaker 3: that ability. Oh and the other thing is note that
Speaker 3: the way that they do cryptobiosis is an inactive state.
Speaker 3: They're able to survive environmental extremes by going inactive, but
Speaker 3: an active animal is pretty easy to kill. So sometimes
Speaker 3: you read that Tartar grades are extremophiles, and they're really not.
Speaker 3: They're extremeo tolerant is the better term, and that makes
Speaker 3: a difference if you're an astrobiologist interested in life on
Speaker 3: other planets and looking at Earth models for what that
Speaker 3: might look like. It's really different if you're an extremophile
Speaker 3: versus extrematolerant. So my proviso is that some tartar grades
Speaker 3: are the toughest animals on Earth. When they're sleeping.
Speaker 2: Do you think that their brains are just water activated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So here's what happens. Here's how they do this.
Speaker 3: Back to your question of how they do this. So
Speaker 3: imagine you're a tartar grade living on a moss cushion
Speaker 3: and you're happily crawling around in the water film of
Speaker 3: that moss doing your little tardigrade life. But the sun
Speaker 3: comes up and the water starts to dry up, and
Speaker 3: you're gonna die if you don't do something. So you
Speaker 3: pull in your legs, you contract all your muscles and
Speaker 3: curl up, and that expels all the water from your
Speaker 3: body and you form this little shape called a ton
Speaker 3: t un, which is a barrel shape. It looks like
Speaker 3: some other word for a cask or a barrel. So
Speaker 3: they go into this ton state, and while they do that,
Speaker 3: they start producing a whole biochemical toolkit of protectant molecules.
Speaker 3: And we're learning more about this every year, and there's
Speaker 3: some biotechnological applications about this as well, which maybe kind
Speaker 3: of gets to your question about what this means for
Speaker 3: longevity and I'm not a biochemist. This isn't my area
Speaker 3: of study, so I won't go into much detail about this,
Speaker 3: but we know that this biochemical toolkit includes antioxidants, heat
Speaker 3: shock proteins, these other really cool proteins called intrinsically disordered proteins,
Speaker 3: and in some cases they produce a sugar called tree helos.
Speaker 3: And what all those molecules do is they help DNA
Speaker 3: not get damaged during cryptobiosis, or if it does get damage,
Speaker 3: they help fix it. They can stitch it back together again.
Speaker 3: They protect the membranes, they protect all the other cells
Speaker 3: the brain, so they're all working together to protect the
Speaker 3: whole package. And we don't know the details, but that's
Speaker 3: generally what's happening. The one particular piece of that that
Speaker 3: I think is the coolest is the sugar tree holos.
Speaker 4: Again, this is a wild so in.
Speaker 3: The ones that produce tree helos, what they do is
Speaker 3: they start to dry out. They produce this simple sugar
Speaker 3: and some of these other proteins connect with the sugar
Speaker 3: and they start to convert the animal from its liquid
Speaker 3: state to a glass like state in the process called vitrification.
Speaker 3: So it's like if you had a bag of gummy bears,
Speaker 3: just regular gunners spilled open and dried out for months
Speaker 3: and months and months, they would become hardened and they'd
Speaker 3: become like a little rigid gummy bear. That's exactly what's
Speaker 3: happening with these Tartar grades is they become rigid, little
Speaker 3: microscopic gummy bears that are hardened in glass like because
Speaker 3: of the sugar casing that forms a matrix protecting all
Speaker 3: the cells in their body.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, is it water soluble?
Speaker 3: Then it is, Yeah, it is, so this is would
Speaker 3: happen when it's drying out. A really cool biotechnological application
Speaker 3: of that is a pharmaceutical company has used biomemicry where
Speaker 3: they said, hey, that's a cool thing that some of
Speaker 3: these animals, like Tartar grades do this vitrification thing. I
Speaker 3: wonder if we can use vitrification to stabilize vaccines for
Speaker 3: long periods of time. And they actually they didn't use
Speaker 3: the exact same sugar, but they used another sugar and
Speaker 3: they created little tiny sugar globules that captured the vaccines
Speaker 3: and it worked. They have huge long shell life and
Speaker 3: when they're injected in the body, the sugar just disperses
Speaker 3: and mounts and then the vaccine can be released. Wow.
Speaker 2: Oh, I have so many questions from listeners. Can I
Speaker 2: ask you one million?
Speaker 3: Sure? Sure?
Speaker 2: Okay? And before we get to here one million questions patrons,
Speaker 2: Let's first toss a little money toward a reputable cause,
Speaker 2: and this week Paul picked the wonderful Zerxi Society. We
Speaker 2: love them. For over fifty years, the Zerxi Society for
Speaker 2: Invertebrate Conservation has protected endangered species and their habitats, produced
Speaker 2: groundbreaking publications, trained thousands of farmers and land managers to
Speaker 2: conserve habitat, and raised awareness about the importance and plight
Speaker 2: of invertebrates in forests, prairies, deserts and in oceans. So
Speaker 2: you can find out more about their programs at zercees
Speaker 2: xerces dot org, which is linked in the show notes.
Speaker 2: And that donation was made.
Speaker 7: Possible by sponsors of ologies ban lantalmagts Boga on the Henir,
Speaker 7: the Hula, the Hayman Ahead Cause, ah Ers Ors Lance
Speaker 7: LADENI Detained Nudovshuhu La Jula, Trumperoids on us Ors lanse
Speaker 7: Is Phaser, lad Gun's Throw, Tasha Tapa Sera nashka.
Speaker 1: Is FuGO moreri h I A punk ie is called
Speaker 1: on tudoros or raslanse if we realed this in.
Speaker 2: The hearn okay now in your questions. Patrons submitted these
Speaker 2: via patreon dot com. Slash ologies were for one dollar
Speaker 2: a month. I may ask your question and say your
Speaker 2: name with my mouth. We even have tears to leave
Speaker 2: us an audio message so you could hear your voice
Speaker 2: on the show. But yes, this one was asked by
Speaker 2: patrons Rowan Tree, PAVCA thirty four, Levi I Morris, Laura M. Smithberg,
Speaker 2: Gilly Magzaroni, Gabriel Charmoney, Christine Hurley's Douggie, Rosi Hope, Madeline
Speaker 2: and Gregorias of Tomsk in their words, asked, is it
Speaker 2: possible Tarta Grade had once hitched a ride on an
Speaker 2: asteroid from another solar system? We were talking about and
Speaker 2: how they survive in space? But essentially, are the aliens?
Speaker 2: Did they come from space? How do they do what
Speaker 2: they do? Did they come from another planet?
Speaker 3: Yes, Virginia, they are aliens.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. Yes, Virginia. Is what people say when
Speaker 2: they allow you to believe in magic and they don't
Speaker 2: ruin it for.
Speaker 3: You in the sense that they're exotic and unusual to
Speaker 3: most people. Okay, but it's not because the Tartar grades
Speaker 3: and where their home planet is. It's because people don't
Speaker 3: pay attention to the microscopic world. So, yeah, why do
Speaker 3: you think people ask that question.
Speaker 2: I think that they seem so much heartier, and we
Speaker 2: maybe compare them to ourselves, and so we think if
Speaker 2: we are the standard species on the planet, because that's
Speaker 2: how humans think, and they are so different. They must
Speaker 2: be from Mars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they survive space exposure, right right?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, okay, Well let me think about that a while.
Speaker 2: No, no hard, no, no great, So.
Speaker 3: A couple things come to mind. The studies that expose
Speaker 3: them to space have a huge fine print qualification that
Speaker 3: we need to talk about. The headline is that tartar
Speaker 3: grades survived space exposure. The details are much more nuanced
Speaker 3: than that, and the reality is they did not survive
Speaker 3: all the hazards of space, so that piece of the
Speaker 3: observation doesn't really fit. No, they can't survive long term
Speaker 3: travel through space. And when you look at them, maybe
Speaker 3: they look unusual if you haven't seen a whole lot
Speaker 3: of other related invertebrates. But they're DNA's just like our DNA.
Speaker 3: They have gene sequences base pair for base pair. They're
Speaker 3: just like closely related species. The biochemistry of their cuticle
Speaker 3: and their molting processes just like other molting animals. They're
Speaker 3: obviously very closely related to Earth animals unless all of
Speaker 3: them came from somewhere else. Maybe not likely, probably not so.
Speaker 2: Flim flam fusted. Tartar grades are not aliens on Earth.
Speaker 2: It's okay, We'll be okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that idea. By the way, astrobiology is the study
Speaker 3: of the possibility of life on other planets and a
Speaker 3: look at tartar grades and other extreme survival animals to
Speaker 3: see if they can tell them something about what to
Speaker 3: look for. And one particular idea that's very controversial from
Speaker 3: that is this idea of panspermia. Yes, which is the
Speaker 3: idea that maybe organisms have hopped from one planet to
Speaker 3: another through asteroids. Oh, that experiment I mentioned about getting
Speaker 3: shot out of guns, that was the motivation for that.
Speaker 3: They wanted to determine if they could withstand an impact
Speaker 3: similar to a meteor hitting a planet, and the answer was.
Speaker 4: Ohellma, okay.
Speaker 2: Carlos Alvarez wants to know.
Speaker 8: I read a few years ago that some of them
Speaker 8: were sent in a lunar module to the Moon and
Speaker 8: it crashed and now they're spilled somewhere on the.
Speaker 2: Moon, but an engine fold caused it to crash, scattering
Speaker 2: into thousands of pieces.
Speaker 8: It makes me think of the times we have moved
Speaker 8: species around on this planet and created a whole new nightmare.
Speaker 8: What are the chances that these are surviving there, and
Speaker 8: what are the unknown things that we may have just
Speaker 8: done to the Moon. You know, one day in a
Speaker 8: million years, it's just covered in Tarti grades.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, when I heard about that, I thought
Speaker 3: it was a joke. You know, it was like an
Speaker 3: Israeli space mission sent a liner module the Moon and
Speaker 3: it crashed and it had Tarti grades on it. I
Speaker 3: was thinking, Okay, yeah, what's the punchline. But it was real.
Speaker 3: It was real, and yeah, I was kind of shocked,
Speaker 3: and my colleagues and I talked about this. I don't
Speaker 3: understand the motivation. They had several things in the payload
Speaker 3: of that module that were Earth relics, including Tarte grades
Speaker 3: in cryptobiosis, and I never quite understood the logic behind
Speaker 3: that and what they were planning on with that, but yeah,
Speaker 3: it crashed. The people that studied did the shooting out
Speaker 3: of the gun thing said they wouldn't even have survived
Speaker 3: that crash, much less a meteor hitting a planet, so
Speaker 3: they don't think that they survived. There's also no atmosphere
Speaker 3: on the Moon and so there's really no way for
Speaker 3: them to come out of cryptobiosis on the Moon. So
Speaker 3: if they did survive that impact, I think they could
Speaker 3: still be in cryptobiosis, but there's no way for them
Speaker 3: to come out of cryptobiosis. It does raise, I think,
Speaker 3: a legitimate, real ethical question about sending Earth organisms to
Speaker 3: other places. And in fact, there was a lot of
Speaker 3: discussion about that, and the authors of that study, the
Speaker 3: Lunar module study, said, well, we know that that's a problem.
Speaker 3: We wouldn't do that any place that actually had an
Speaker 3: atmosphere where they could survive. So why they did it
Speaker 3: to the Moon I don't know still, but they did.
Speaker 2: Let's say that some sprinklers went off on the Moon
Speaker 2: and they did rehydrate and they came out of it,
Speaker 2: and all there was to eat were the other tartar grades.
Speaker 2: Do they ever cannibalize?
Speaker 3: They don't cannibalize. Okay, but big ones eat smaller ones,
Speaker 3: and so yeah, they could, they could. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes. If you saw a headline this week such as
Speaker 2: spiders on Mars fully awakened on Earth for first time
Speaker 2: and scientists are shrieking with joy, don't take that clickbait
Speaker 2: or just do, but note that it's about cracks on
Speaker 2: the surface of Mars that look like spiders from Afar.
Speaker 2: Astrogeologists have figured out why they happened, hence these things
Speaker 2: are called are aneaform terrain named after spiders, but alas
Speaker 2: there are no real giant spiders on Mars, although we
Speaker 2: do have an entire astrobiology episode with doctor Kevin Hand,
Speaker 2: who's a NASA researcher looking for life on the Jupiter
Speaker 2: moon Europa. We'll link in the show notes. But on
Speaker 2: the topic of animals that will be astronauts, Katie Oldman
Speaker 2: first time question asker asked, could should we have we
Speaker 2: already tried sending them into space? And other patrons such
Speaker 2: as Gwen Hughes, Reuben Nikitchribitz, Brian Smith, Mary and Rachel Guthrie,
Speaker 2: Christian Fuller, Aaron Sorens and Zephyr and Sidney Kaneing in
Speaker 2: Sydney's words, said, wait, how did we figure out the
Speaker 2: space thing? It's a good question. I thought that they
Speaker 2: just went into cryptobiosis, but how did they survive space exposure?
Speaker 3: That is, yeah, that's what launched them into fame. Ah,
Speaker 3: they did indeed survive space exposure. So what happened is
Speaker 3: there were four different experiments that were done that included
Speaker 3: tartar grades in space. In two thousand and seven there
Speaker 3: was a photon M three satellite mission that had three
Speaker 3: different modules on board with tartar grades, and then in
Speaker 3: twenty eleven there was a fourth one that went up
Speaker 3: to the International Space Station and collectively they had five
Speaker 3: different species of tartar grades on board. They had eggs,
Speaker 3: animals in cryptobiosis, and in one study they actually had
Speaker 3: active animals not in cryptobiosis, and they exposed them to
Speaker 3: different aspects of space, brought them back to Earth, looked
Speaker 3: at how many survived, and what they found collectively is
Speaker 3: that when the animals were exposed to the microgravity and
Speaker 3: the cosmic radiation of space, they survived really really well,
Speaker 3: including the ones that were not in cryptobiosis. And that
Speaker 3: was huge news because no animals have ever survived space exposure.
Speaker 3: Of course, that'd be a really nasty experiment to do
Speaker 3: to you know, little space monkey or something. But it
Speaker 3: was huge news, a lot of press about it, very
Speaker 3: spectacular results, but there's a lot of fine print that
Speaker 3: isn't ever talked about. And the fine print is that
Speaker 3: it wasn't like they had them on little microtethers on
Speaker 3: space walks and they brought them back into the spaceship.
Speaker 3: They weren't exposed to all aspects of space. They were
Speaker 3: exposed to some aspects of space. They were enclosed cases,
Speaker 3: so in all of those experiments they were in temperature
Speaker 3: controlled cases, and so they didn't get exposed to the
Speaker 3: huge temperature fluctuations of space. And in the case of
Speaker 3: the active animals, they were not exposed to the vacuum
Speaker 3: of space, for example, And in all of them except
Speaker 3: one they were protected from UV radiation, and in the
Speaker 3: one in which they were exposed to full spectrum UV,
Speaker 3: they died pretty quickly. So the headline was Tarti Gray's
Speaker 3: survive exposure to space, but the details are they could
Speaker 3: handle some aspects of space, which is shocking and amazing,
Speaker 3: but they didn't handle to total exposure. To space.
Speaker 2: So the hard vacuum of outer space survivable for many
Speaker 2: of the tartar grade astronauts. Now the vacuum plus the
Speaker 2: solar radiation, which is true to space less survivable. Ah okay,
Speaker 2: Well that demystifies them. Yeah, and also probably will be
Speaker 2: very helpful in busting the flip flame that they are
Speaker 2: aliens exactly exactly. I like the idea too that people
Speaker 2: here that octopuses are so out there and interesting they
Speaker 2: must also be aliens. I like the idea that an
Speaker 2: octopus just has armloads of tartar grades. They're careening on
Speaker 2: an astroid, they crash in and they're like, what's up?
Speaker 2: We heard the bugs of it up. So if tartar
Speaker 2: grades and the world in miniature interests, you consider getting
Speaker 2: your hooks into this research. And on that note, Petron
Speaker 2: Scarlet p wanted to know what are the claw looking
Speaker 2: things on the tartar grade's feet and what are they for?
Speaker 2: And eating dog hair for a living ast what are
Speaker 2: those flipper looking things on their stumps used for? And
Speaker 2: this topic was also on the minds of Jacolin Church
Speaker 2: Flush first Odoctopus Spella, average Pie, Susan Lynn, and Addie
Speaker 2: Capello said, they're like water wombats. Look at those talons.
Speaker 2: What are those claws on their feet for?
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, the ones that have claws, they use them
Speaker 3: to hold onto the sediment. They're crawling around, grasping hold
Speaker 3: of the sediment. The ones on the fourth pair of
Speaker 3: legs that are turned around backwards that I mentioned before,
Speaker 3: in a lot of cases, they use those like prehensile organs.
Speaker 3: They hold on with those, and then when they want
Speaker 3: to move they let go of those and.
Speaker 2: Crawl with the first three pairs of legs, kind of
Speaker 2: like a rear wheel drive, I guess.
Speaker 3: But not all targer grades have claws, and especially the
Speaker 3: marine ones are really hyper diverse and have a whole
Speaker 3: array of different feet type, including some that have fingers
Speaker 3: that end in adhesive pads, and all kinds of really
Speaker 3: cool differences. And so that's again the problem of kind
Speaker 3: of thinking about the kind that floats around on the
Speaker 3: internet too much.
Speaker 2: M Amber Panita and Sirih Grossman. First time question asker
Speaker 2: wanted to know about their number of legs. Siri asked,
Speaker 2: eight legs. Why is that some primal, perfect optimal walking
Speaker 2: number of legs?
Speaker 3: Well, they have five body segments and there's a leg
Speaker 3: for each of the segments except for the head. And
Speaker 3: there's some really cool evo devo studies that found out
Speaker 3: that what happened as they got miniaturized from ancestral lobopodians,
Speaker 3: which were macroscopic, is that the middle segments of the
Speaker 3: body got chopped out and left the other segments, and
Speaker 3: so they evolved from multi legged more like millipede like things. Oh,
Speaker 3: I mean, those are arthropods with jointed legs, but they
Speaker 3: look kind of like lobi. They look like caterpillars with
Speaker 3: loby legs. And so as those segments got cut out,
Speaker 3: five segments were left for one pair of leg for
Speaker 3: all the segments except for the head.
Speaker 2: Well, Sophie Develle, first time question asker, says, I'm a
Speaker 2: dentist and I would love to note if they have teeth,
Speaker 2: and if they do, what are they like?
Speaker 3: A good question. Some do have teeth, and they're thickenings
Speaker 3: around the mouth. The mouth's a circle and there are
Speaker 3: sometimes one, two or three rows of dentate structures that
Speaker 3: poke inward, and so they're kind of laterally oriented around
Speaker 3: this circle and they're poking inward and they probably use
Speaker 3: them for grasping as they try to suck stuff down
Speaker 3: their bugle tube.
Speaker 2: Do they ever suck down any nasties and get food poisoning?
Speaker 2: Frina run Stadler asked what kind of immune system does
Speaker 2: the tartar grate have, and Janie Jones was concerned do
Speaker 2: they get sick? Ali and Julian want to know are
Speaker 2: they affected by bacteria and viruses?
Speaker 3: We know there's some parasitic funguses that have attacked them,
Speaker 3: and I think some other protozoan can't remember which what now.
Speaker 3: And there's some marine ones that have these pouches on
Speaker 3: the head that are packed with bacteria, and apparently they
Speaker 3: have a symbiosis with these bacteria and are using them
Speaker 3: for something presumably maybe chemosynthesis or something like that. Don't
Speaker 3: really know. So somehow they're getting probably getting nutrients from
Speaker 3: these bacteria. Oh, there have been a couple studies of
Speaker 3: tartargrade microbiomes recently, really yeah, and they have found a
Speaker 3: whole series of bacteria and other things that are in
Speaker 3: their guts.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's exciting, But I.
Speaker 3: Don't know about any bacteria that are disease causing.
Speaker 2: Speaking of peril sad question, Rebecca, if it's given Povka
Speaker 2: thirty four tricyclecent want to know, in Rebecca's words, are
Speaker 2: they being impacted by climate change? Rising tides lift all
Speaker 2: water bears?
Speaker 4: They ask, hopeful, Yeah, that's hopeful.
Speaker 3: Well, there have been some studies of them being impacted
Speaker 3: by climate change. There's some people doing some really cool
Speaker 3: studies in glaciers, and there are these things called cryoconite holes,
Speaker 3: which are circular tubular holes that form as ice melts
Speaker 3: and then it gathers some gunk in the bottom and
Speaker 3: then some animals colonize it. Not very many, but a
Speaker 3: few things can colonize those croyut nite holes. And they've
Speaker 3: been talking about concerns as the glaciers melt, that is
Speaker 3: having potential negative impacts. And this other study recently looked
Speaker 3: at those stylets that I mentioned. The paired stylets have
Speaker 3: calcim carbonate in them, so.
Speaker 2: A reminder, a stylet is like a mouth knife, and
Speaker 2: when tartagrades molt, these fall off and then they just
Speaker 2: secrete new ones with glands near their face opening and.
Speaker 3: Are therefore potentially impacted by acid. And so they have
Speaker 3: looked at whether or not acidic conditions can erode those
Speaker 3: things like in ocean acidification. Perhaps, so there is some
Speaker 3: indication that it could damage things, and that's right now,
Speaker 3: a lab study instead of a field study.
Speaker 2: Susan Mashrak wanted to know. I wonder, since they've survived
Speaker 2: so much, how they'll do with the microplastic crisis we're
Speaker 2: currently in. Did anyone ever find microplastics in their little guts?
Speaker 3: You know, that's a funny question. I just saw a
Speaker 3: paper that was looking at microplastics and microscopic organisms, and
Speaker 3: for some reason, they found them in all kinds of
Speaker 3: other microscopic animals that were in their habitats, but not
Speaker 3: in the tartar grades stop. Somehow they weren't picking up
Speaker 3: the microplastics. It was just one study just came out.
Speaker 3: I have no idea why that was the case, but
Speaker 3: I do think it's possible that they could be picking
Speaker 3: them up. It might be that they because of using
Speaker 3: those stylets, maybe it acts as a filter somehow and
Speaker 3: they can't pick them up. I don't know, but I
Speaker 3: would think that eventually we'll find them in there, as long.
Speaker 2: As we're growing ever more fond of them. What is
Speaker 2: the correct term of endearment? Josie Rutherford asked, some people
Speaker 2: call these water bears, others potato walruss. Is this one
Speaker 2: of those tests where what you see reveals an aspect
Speaker 2: of your deep psyche. Andrew mckelvey's Izzy, Emily heard, Mona
Speaker 2: fin Layson, Emily Venko, and Miranda Panda also had etymological questions,
Speaker 2: as well as Belle Aspiring garbage archaeologists wants to know
Speaker 2: why did the nicknames waterbear and moss piglet? Where do
Speaker 2: those come from? And which would you say is more accurate?
Speaker 3: Ah, moss piglets is not very inclusive. Okay, that's right,
Speaker 3: all of those that live on moss, right, So I
Speaker 3: wouldn't use that term. When you look at tartar grades
Speaker 3: through a microscope, when you look at in that little world,
Speaker 3: you see all these wormy kind of things that move
Speaker 3: in a wormy like fashion. But when you see tarte
Speaker 3: grays move really differently. Right. They're they're kind of wiggling
Speaker 3: their their fat and chubby, and they have these thick
Speaker 3: legs that they're waving gently. Their head moves a little
Speaker 3: bit side to side. Some of them have these big,
Speaker 3: soulful highs, right, so they kind of look mammalian. And
Speaker 3: the very first person who ever described to tartar grade
Speaker 3: was Johann Gutza back in seventeen seventy three, and he,
Speaker 3: in that very first paper ever written on tarta grades,
Speaker 3: thought that they looked like Kleiner Vasserbert little water bears.
Speaker 2: So we have a two part ersonology episode all about bears,
Speaker 2: as well as a carnivore ecology episode with Arthur Ray
Speaker 2: Winn Grant. And yes, they are linked in the show notes.
Speaker 3: So that's the most common common name. By the way,
Speaker 3: there's some pop culture trivia about Gutsa. Yes, tell me
Speaker 3: you ought to know? Yeah, of course, very it's trivial trivia.
Speaker 3: You know the you know the TV show Star Trek Discovery.
Speaker 2: Yes, we had people ask about that. Yeah, we had
Speaker 2: several people ask about this, Okay. Patricia Evans, Daniel Sucher,
Speaker 2: Becky Disasci Segret scientist, and Luna Rose.
Speaker 3: They have character that the crew members call Ripper, and
Speaker 3: it's a human size tartar grade.
Speaker 5: Like alien, Hello, brought you the good stuff.
Speaker 3: And it allows them to do giant hops through the
Speaker 3: universe because, of course it has a symbiotic relationship with
Speaker 3: space Mycelia. Of course, of course, on a side, an
Speaker 3: offshoot of Star Trek Discovery, we learn that ripper preferred
Speaker 3: name is Ephrahim, which is Johann Gutz's middle name.
Speaker 2: Oh that's very sweet. That's so sweet. I love that.
Speaker 3: If you win bar trivia with that question, I want
Speaker 3: half of your winnings.
Speaker 2: I just said that in an episode that went up
Speaker 2: about k waves literally yesterday, I was like, we're winning
Speaker 2: a lot of bars, where's our ten versaid? Also, Paul
Speaker 2: casually mentioned that yes, well, tartar grades are cute, and
Speaker 2: they have cryptobiotic superpowers. Some of them fluoresce in these
Speaker 2: beautiful colors. He calls them disco bears. And one of
Speaker 2: his most recent research projects was exploring autofluorescence in tartar grades,
Speaker 2: which is different from bioluminescence. Apparently autofluorescence happens by absorbing light,
Speaker 2: and then bioluminescence is chemical and caused by an enzyme.
Speaker 2: But we could go on and on. Let's get to
Speaker 2: how do you meet one and hopefully befriend a tartar grade?
Speaker 2: So many people we gotta know. How do you find them?
Speaker 2: I get them? How do we look at tartar grades?
Speaker 2: How do we do it?
Speaker 3: Now that I can help you with. But basically you
Speaker 3: gotta have a microscope how strong you know, even a
Speaker 3: forty power dissecting scope and see them and tell that
Speaker 3: they're tartar grades. You can't like look at fine structures
Speaker 3: to identify them, but you can tell that they're tartar
Speaker 3: grades just with a simple, inexpensive microscope. And so what
Speaker 3: we do is we make these pipe plates, sieves, Barreman's funnels,
Speaker 3: they're called. And so you take a styrofoam plate, you
Speaker 3: put another one on top of it, and cut a
Speaker 3: hole out of the bottom and put a screen on it,
Speaker 3: and then put a tissue paper over that, and then
Speaker 3: crumble up a moss all over that and then fill
Speaker 3: it with water. And it helps if you shine a
Speaker 3: light on them, and what happens is they move away
Speaker 3: from the light and away from the heat, and they
Speaker 3: go down through the tissue paper. The animals go through
Speaker 3: the tissue paper and gather down in the water on
Speaker 3: the bottom pie plate. And then you can just pour
Speaker 3: that off into a petri dish and you can find them.
Speaker 2: So, yes, this is called a Bareman funnel. And there
Speaker 2: are a lot of ways and materials you can diy this,
Speaker 2: including just using a regular funnel with a little tubing
Speaker 2: to kind of stop it at the end, make a
Speaker 2: ja at the end of it. You can just put
Speaker 2: like a coffee filter or pantyhose or a cheese cloth
Speaker 2: at the bottom of the funnel. You wet your moss
Speaker 2: so that you have like an inch of that kind
Speaker 2: of soupy water at the bottom, and sixteen or so
Speaker 2: hours later your critters will move away from the light
Speaker 2: and through the filter and into that tubing. So then
Speaker 2: you could take that and then you can see them
Speaker 2: pretty cleanly in a dish under the microscope.
Speaker 3: And if you look in mosses, lichens, leaf, litter, soil
Speaker 3: grit in your gutter, they will be there.
Speaker 2: No, so forty power is enough. Some of them are
Speaker 2: look transparent, So do you kind of get an eye
Speaker 2: for it so you don't glaze over them? Or are
Speaker 2: they pretty obvious?
Speaker 3: Yeah, some of them can be very transparent. Some of
Speaker 3: them are very small, very transparent, sometimes rare, so you
Speaker 3: have to be patient. It helps if you have samples
Speaker 3: so the animals are still alive, so you can see
Speaker 3: that movement, because the movement is very characteristic. Nothing else
Speaker 3: moves like that.
Speaker 2: More on those moves in a moment.
Speaker 3: The trick is, once you have them and you found them,
Speaker 3: and if you want to look at them at higher magnification,
Speaker 3: you got to transfer them to a microscope slide and
Speaker 3: look at a high powered microscope. And to do that
Speaker 3: you have to have like some kind of permanent mounting medium,
Speaker 3: and when you do that, you can't transfer water into it.
Speaker 3: So what we have is tiny little tartar grade lassos
Speaker 3: and we can flick them up, catch them on the lasso,
Speaker 3: and then transfer them over to the mounting medium and.
Speaker 2: Do they perish in the process, Yes?
Speaker 4: Probably? Okay, that's free.
Speaker 2: Can you describe that locomotion that is not computer generated?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they all four legs are constantly moving, and
Speaker 3: especially if you have them on a petri dish, so
Speaker 3: they can't grab hold of something, they're kind of laying
Speaker 3: on their backs, kind of just in one spot, flailing
Speaker 3: their legs and so they're they're moving their legs and
Speaker 3: they all are moving kind of at their own rate,
Speaker 3: so they're not synchronized or anything. They're just kind of
Speaker 3: waving around and then the heads moving side to side slowly,
Speaker 3: and so they just immediately look like a little bear
Speaker 3: with eight legs instead of four.
Speaker 2: With all of this love for tartar grades, because we
Speaker 2: love them so much, there must be something about your
Speaker 2: job as a tartar gradologist that sucks, or something about
Speaker 2: tartar grades that maybe gets your goat anything bad about
Speaker 2: your job, we will ask the best thing.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's see. I think one thing about studying tartar
Speaker 3: grades is that sometimes it can be dismissed by some
Speaker 3: people because they're like a niche animal, you know, they're
Speaker 3: they're like, why would you study a little critter like that?
Speaker 3: You know, it's not it doesn't have human impact. So
Speaker 3: some there's a little bit of that, Oh they're so cute.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like, oh, you're doing that cute kind
Speaker 3: of stuff, So there's a little bit of that maybe. Otherwise,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure I would have studied tartar grades early
Speaker 3: in my career because I don't think I would have
Speaker 3: sat at a microscope that long. You know, there's the
Speaker 3: work for tartar grade ologists is to go out in
Speaker 3: the field one day and then you have weeks and
Speaker 3: weeks of lab work to do and microscopy to do.
Speaker 3: So you gotta be willing and interested in microscopes and
Speaker 3: be willing to sit in a lab in a microscope
Speaker 3: to study them. It's not like going to the Serengetti
Speaker 3: and you know, watching tartar grades clash into one another
Speaker 3: and that kind of thing. It doesn't you know.
Speaker 2: Do you have playlists in the lab like you're just
Speaker 2: jamming out? Do you listen to books on tape?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I have all kinds of playlists. There's nothing tartar
Speaker 3: grade specific.
Speaker 2: Though someone did ask about Cosmo shell Drake speaking of music,
Speaker 2: how accurate is the song tartar Grade song by Cosmo Shelldrakes.
Speaker 3: My sall my liquid and lets myself try out our
Speaker 3: friv and.
Speaker 2: Sleep LEXI gotshl emmett Wald both asked and dig rode
Speaker 2: in not a question, but I ironically woke up with
Speaker 2: Cosmo shell drakes tartar Grade song stuck in my head
Speaker 2: this morning. Dig cosmically connected. We're going to have to
Speaker 2: add it to your playlist no matter what.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we need that, and I've heard it, but it's
Speaker 3: been a long time since I've heard it. My favorite
Speaker 3: tartar grade song is won by Mal Webb, who's an
Speaker 3: Australian guy that does all of his music by mouth
Speaker 3: sounds I wish and I'd be comfy and awhere. I
Speaker 3: think it's hilarious and it's very accurate really in terms
Speaker 3: of he talks about centuries of happy dozing and I
Speaker 3: want to be a tartar grade.
Speaker 2: I haven't blame them, but of course, now that we
Speaker 2: know the toughest thing, what is the best thing about
Speaker 2: tartar grades. What's the best thing about being a tartargardologist?
Speaker 2: You have such a cool job and life.
Speaker 3: Well, the best thing is that they are charismatic and
Speaker 3: so people like them, and they've gotten to be famous.
Speaker 3: They weren't famous when I started studying them, and so
Speaker 3: that was kind of just an accident that they survived
Speaker 3: space exposure and got famous because of that. And that's
Speaker 3: really it's fun because people know about them now and
Speaker 3: so people want to know about them, and that's not
Speaker 3: true for most microscopic life. And it's useful to me
Speaker 3: because my ulterior motive is for students of all ages,
Speaker 3: is to get people interested in microscopic life because it's
Speaker 3: so abundant and so crazy and so poorly studied. So
Speaker 3: tartar grades are a great hook to do that.
Speaker 2: This has been one of my favorite episodes. I don't
Speaker 2: like to name favorite episodes. Is one of my favorite ever.
Speaker 2: This has been such a wonderful privilege to talk to
Speaker 2: you about tartar grades. I have a feeling that because
Speaker 2: of this, there will be future tartar gradologists. Well. Michelle
Speaker 2: Weldman fellow tartar gredologist. They spent the past year studying
Speaker 2: tartar grades for their masters thesis and they're currently in
Speaker 2: the process of writing up the report for it, so
Speaker 2: I know they have a tartar gradologist to chartgredologists question here.
Speaker 6: So my question for theologists is what they think the
Speaker 6: future of tarte grade research should be or should look like.
Speaker 6: Do I think we need to focus more on their
Speaker 6: distributions and diversities, or their physiological mechanisms that are responsible
Speaker 6: for things like cryptobiosis. I'm so excited that you're finally
Speaker 6: getting a chance to touch up on this topic. It's
Speaker 6: an extremely interesting study. And yeah, I love your podcast
Speaker 6: and really excited for.
Speaker 4: This, would you say, Rochelle Rochelle, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So great question. I'm not sure what it should do.
Speaker 3: I know what it's been doing. I mean the history
Speaker 3: of tartar grade research has changed over time. I think
Speaker 3: as more and more people have started studying Tarte grades
Speaker 3: and as molecular biology has kind of moved into the scene,
Speaker 3: it used to be that a lot of Tartar grade
Speaker 3: researchers were at small colleges doing a lot of natural
Speaker 3: history kind of stuff, taxonomy kind of stuff, a little
Speaker 3: bit of ecology. And part of that was because there
Speaker 3: wasn't a lot of funding for because they're not human pests.
Speaker 3: You know, they're not economically important to humans, which I
Speaker 3: find kind of charming.
Speaker 4: Really, they don't need us, they don't need us.
Speaker 3: It's great. So it was mostly people with small or
Speaker 3: no grants kind of messing around having fun. Now that
Speaker 3: we are learning a lot more about these biochemical toolkit
Speaker 3: for cryptobiosis and possible applications of that, big science is
Speaker 3: taking over. Molecular science, I think, is moving in and
Speaker 3: it's great. I mean, it's opening all kinds of doors.
Speaker 3: So I would fear for this is an old guy
Speaker 3: talk and this is a dinosaur kind of comment, but
Speaker 3: I would fear for us to move all the way
Speaker 3: into the world of molecular biology and forget the field
Speaker 3: natural history, because if you don't know the species and
Speaker 3: where they live, and what they're doing, you can't connect
Speaker 3: it to real world stuff. So I hope we continue
Speaker 3: that we've that is a problem. There's not a whole
Speaker 3: lot of tart of grade ologists who are doing things
Speaker 3: that are ecology related natural history related anymore.
Speaker 2: If someone decides tartar grades are their destiny, should they
Speaker 2: just google how to become a tartar gradologist?
Speaker 3: Now they can contact me, email me. I'll help you.
Speaker 3: I'm always wanting more people to study. We have very
Speaker 3: few people that are studying them, and especially doing the
Speaker 3: natural history kind of stuff us old timers do. So
Speaker 3: I help anybody that contacts me, I help them get started.
Speaker 2: Watch out watcher in box, so ask terrific people tartagrad
Speaker 2: iological questions and actually, wait one more. Okay, what is
Speaker 2: Paul's favorite species of tartar grade among the numerous out there.
Speaker 2: He told me in a note later that it's the
Speaker 2: marine tartar grade Tenarctis bubble Ubus tenarctis bubble ubus, real name,
Speaker 2: And in his words, it has a cluster of balloons
Speaker 2: growing out of its butt. And I look this up
Speaker 2: and truly it is a little idy bitty creature trailing
Speaker 2: what looks like a handful of balloon like imagine of
Speaker 2: the house from up was microscopic and it was a
Speaker 2: water bear instead of a house balloons out his butt. Paul,
Speaker 2: You're a treasure. We adore you to find out more
Speaker 2: about Paul's work. We have linked to it in the
Speaker 2: show notes, as well as two Smologies, which is our
Speaker 2: spinoffs show that is safe for kids. There's also a
Speaker 2: link to Zercees dot org and so many other episodes
Speaker 2: you might like, as well as to our Patreon so
Speaker 2: you can submit questions yourself, and there are links to
Speaker 2: our social media. We are at Ologies on Instagram and X.
Speaker 2: I'm at Ali Ward It's just one L and Ali
Speaker 2: on Instagram and X as well. Aaron Talbert Adminsiologies podcast
Speaker 2: Facebook group and has also been my bff since we
Speaker 2: were four, so we have slurged around many algae filled
Speaker 2: ditches together among so many tartar grades. Thank you Erin
Speaker 2: for being my partner that Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts.
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth is our wonderful scheduling producer and Susan Hale
Speaker 2: managing directs us as managing director and also does some
Speaker 2: additional research Kelly Rtwyer does the website, and our sole
Speaker 2: non woman contributor is the lovely editor Jake Chafe. And
Speaker 2: getting all the pieces together so that we are not
Speaker 2: tardy ourselves is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.
Speaker 2: Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick
Speaker 2: around to the end of the episode, I tell you
Speaker 2: a secret, and this week it's that. Listen. Sometimes my
Speaker 2: face gets fuzzy, and sometimes I do what is called
Speaker 2: derma planing, which is another word for shaving your face.
Speaker 2: Just a razor. It's a regular razor you would use
Speaker 2: on your legs, but I used it on my face
Speaker 2: and I did it, and I thought, ah, that's a
Speaker 2: little smoother. It's just peach fuzz but you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, just get it off. And I did that,
Speaker 2: and then I just went to record. And I want
Speaker 2: you to know that I have tiny hairs from my
Speaker 2: face now stuck to my face and they itch and
Speaker 2: I want to wash my face. And I don't want
Speaker 2: to tell you this, but I need. I needed a
Speaker 2: secret for this one, and I thought, why give you
Speaker 2: a life hack when I could reveal something even more
Speaker 2: true and disgusting. Listen, it's called dermo planing. Okay, it
Speaker 2: helps your moisturizerance absorb butter. I gotta wash my face,
Speaker 2: Okay for bye. Pacodermatology, homiology, ydo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology,
Speaker 2: al metteratology, nathology, seriology, seldology.
Speaker 3: Get into space your dirty tart of grade see