I fully expected to click on the article and see zero videos of them walking. Not because I didn’t think tardigrades walk but because science articles often lack media for whatever reason. Kudos to sciencealert
For those interested in the microcosm, there is a youtube channel with high quality footage of lots of things: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g
I'm a dedicated carnivore. I used to work in a lab that did experimental brain surgery on cats. I trap and kill the rodents in my basement with something like glee. But I'm watching a tardigrave having trouble walking across glass and thinking "animal abuse! Someone give that poor little water bear a little traction!"
Emotionally, I am not consistent.
That title is unconscionable. Here's a link to the actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/35/e2107289118
edit: title was edited
BioRxiv paper's on this work is here[0].
This is some pretty interesting work. It'd be interesting to figure out how they adapt walking to traverse 3d terrain, because robots are really bad at this. Tardigrades have about 200 neurons and probably don't have much of concept of proprioception so figuring out how they work would be useful for robots. They might 'cheat' at walking by being able to adhere to the surface though.
[0]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.436228v1....
I vow to never put a tardigrade on to a glass surface, watching the little thing struggle for some reason made me feel bad.
Couldn't help to mentally complete the video of the tardigrade in glass with the sound of 'Macarena'
The interesting part is that they remember a lot to prehistoric mammals like Cynognathus or to moles walking, but then you realize the eight feet.
It's amazing how few atoms you need for a fully functional, fully articulated animal.
Interesting videos but I always assumed they somehow walked since they seem to have legs.
It may turn out that these little guys are the real dolphins from Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.
Of course they walk, it's in the name! Seriously speaking, very cool stuff.
> We Were Not Ready For The Footage
feels like a very tabloidy headline. Why exactly am I not ready?
If you think that’s cool you might also like to see the motor proteins that walk along inside our cells. There are a few types including the ones that make muscles work.
Kinesin is fun because it has little legs made of proteins. It gloms onto big bubbles of stuff inside the cell and carries them along pathways to their destination. Chemical reactions cause the proteins to fold in the right way to take each step.
This shows how they look. https://youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8
This explains the mechanisms that they use to walk.
https://youtu.be/9RUHJhskW00