150
Cute Little Tardigrades Are Basically Indestructible, and Scientists Just Figured Out One Reason Why
(www.scientificamerican.com)
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
I think it goes a bit beyond that as well. Other organisms could, in theory, take some of the same measures the tardigrade takes to make itself hardier. It's possible that we don't see this all over the place because the chemical signalling is a requirement of the tun state. Without it, they're basically just dead. Without a signal to return to normal life, they'll stay like that forever. Furthermore, without the signal, they might have to rely on some other, less reliable mechanism, to enter the tun state to start with.
A signaling system that provides its cells with reliable information about environmental conditions is critical.
I think we might even find that the signaling system came first, and that nature selected for tardigrades that had some way to do something with the signal.