Waterbears - The world's toughest animal!

Waterbear, one of the world’s toughest animal (scientifically known as Tardigrade) are small, water-dwelling, segmented micro-animals with eight legs. You can find these micro-animals about everywhere: on the bottom of the ocean, under meters of ice, in hot springs, and on the top of the Himalayas, in the bottle of water you drink too! Sometimes up to 25000 of them in just a liter of water. Tardigrades are usually 1 mm (0.039 in) long when they are fully grown. But this is just common; the amazing fact is that these micro-animals belong to the extremophile family.

Yes, I know…. 
What is an extremophile?

These are organisms that can survive the most extreme physically or geochemically living condition that would kill most other living things on Earth.  These tiny creatures can withstand not only at space in vacuum, solar radiation, gamma radiation and x-rays.  They can withstand temperatures ranging from just below freezing to 120 degrees Celsius.  They can go without food or water for more than 10 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce. They come back to normalcy when surrounding conditions improve!

There are over 1150 known Tardigrade species. Here are some amazing facts:

Tardigrade can survive being heated for a few minutes to 151 °C (304 F), or being chilled for days at −200 °C (-328 F), or some can survive temperatures as low as −273 °C (-458 F) for a few minutes)

They can withstand the extremely low pressure of vacuum and also very high pressures, more than 1,200 times atmospheric pressure. Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of open space and solar radiation combined for at least 10 days. Some species can also withstand pressure of 6,000 atmospheres, which is nearly six times the pressure of water in the deepest ocean trench, the Mariana trench

Longest-living Tardigrades have been shown to survive in a dehydrated for nearly up to 10 years. Tardigrades can withstand 1,000 times more radiation than other animals. Median lethal doses of 5,000 Gy (of gamma-rays) and 6,200 Gy (of heavy ions) in hydrated animals wherein 5 to 10 Gy could be fatal to a human.

Tardigrades are the first known animal to survive in space. On September 2007, dehydrated Tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on a space mission. For 10 days, groups of Tardigrades were exposed to the hard vacuum of outer space, or vacuum and solar UV radiation. After being rehydrated back on Earth, over 68% of the subjects protected from high-energy UV radiation revived within 30 minutes following rehydration.

Bet, you did not know that!!!

Now, try looking into the water you drink!