Tardigrade thinking

This afternoon Glo and I went out on the ocean. Haven't done that much since I left the navy, come to think of it. In Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Saw one turtle, no sharks, waded around on a sandbar for the better part of an hour. It was very uplifting. While strolling across a huge, barely-submerged sand bar, I got to thinking about what was living three or four feet below the sand, and that, of course, led me reflect upon tardigrades.

I used to have an interest in tardigrades, back when I was teaching grade anything at all in British Columbia.

In the spring when the bloom was on I would recreate every swamp in the area in a huge collection of aquarii (?) in the back of my classroom. I'd round up every microscope in the whole school and whatever age kids were being subjected to me would spend weeks studying daphnia, copepods, mosquito larvae, caddis fly larvae, whirligig beetiles, diving beeteles, freshwater snails, leeches... everything we could find. On a few magnificently memorable occasions we found amoebae or parameceums. (I'm just adding an 's' at this point. I have no idea what's the correct pluralization.)

Parameceums were cool but amoebae were the coolest by far. They slithered through, between, over, under, and around like pale grey ghosts, ectoplasmic entities without shape. Form without shape, come to think of it. Interesting. Linguists, does that work?

But we never found a tardigrade. I knew they existed because, along with all the microscopes, I had stolen every book in the school on swamps and ponds and freshwater life, every field guide to anything even close. I read about, and then became eager to find a tardigrade. Never did, though.

Tardigrades are also called water bears, because they look a little teddy bearish. They are, in scientific terms, a phylum of their own. There are 35 phyla, into which all living things are divided. Vertebrates (think "animals" as we loosely use the terms... bunnies, lizards, humans...) are one part of one phyla. Tardigrades are their own. There are about 750 species known.

There is a beautiful video of a tardigrade in motion, which you can find by clicking here.