Does This Strange Animal Have Alien DNA?
Tardigrades are awesome and their just one example of an extremophile. There are also some extremophiles that live in Searles Lake just in case someone's interested in looking up the info.
Don’t bother taking a dip in Searles Lake, California. In fact, it’s a stretch to call this wet spot in the Mojave Desert a lake at all. For starters, there’s not much water, mostly just salt-crusted ooze. The ooze smells like a combination of rotten eggs, decaying fish, and old cheese. It has a pH of 9.8—about the same as bleach. To top things off, the ooze in Searles Lake contains ultra-high levels of arsenic: 29,000 times what is considered safe in drinking water. Even the salt content is nasty: 10 times the salt content of ocean water. Amazingly, something actually lives in Searle Lake’s caustic ooze: a type of bacteria called SLAR-1.
Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form – naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.
Given their need for high temperatures and anaerobic environments, T. petrophila have been found to inhabit production waters on oil reservoirs. These oil stratifications reach high temperatures and are largely devoid of oxygen, making them ideal for this species of bacterium. Although T. petrophila has not been found to grow in geothermal areas such as volcanic hot springs, other species of the Thermotoga genus have been discovered in these regions, leading to the possibility that such regions could sustain life.
It was first isolated and discovered in the Solfatara volcano which it was subsequently named after. However, these organisms are not isolated to volcanoes but are found all over the world in places such as hot springs. The species grows best in temperatures around 80° Celsius, a pH level between 2 to 4, and enough sulfur for solfataricus to metabolize in order to gain energy. These conditions qualify it as an extremophile and it is specifically known as a thermoacidophile because of its preference to high temperatures and low pH levels.
Earlier this year, scientists successfully revived a tardigrade that had been frozen solid for more than three decades—a new record for this durable species.
Tardigrades are strangely adorable microscopic creatures that are capable of withstanding some of the worst that nature can throw at them. Classified as “extremophiles,” they can survive freezing, total dehydration, radiation, and even the vacuum of space.
They can survive in the vacuum of outer space, withstand temperatures ranging from close to absolute zero to nearly 100°C, cope with pressures six times greater than those at the bottom of the deepest ocean and survive dehydration and being frozen for years on end. They can also defy hefty amounts of radiation that would be lethal to most other life on the planet – and now we know how they do it.
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