bubba and the waterbears


The online Smithsonian magazine had an article on tardigrades,

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/high-temperatures-might-be-water-bears-achilles-heel-180974043/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200124-daily-responsive&spMailingID=41621414&spUserID=NjU5OTAwNDUxNjk4S0&spJobID=1682260343&spReportId=MTY4MjI2MDM0MwS2

sufficiently intriguing that I did a little more searching, reading several more articles, including the apparently quite competent Wikipedia coverage of them.



German zoologist J A E Goeze called them kleiner Wasserbär, so they are commonly called water bears. Creatures ubiquitous throughout the earth, land and sea, they are micro-animals of many species, some large enough to view with ordinary microscopes, making them available for study by amateur scientists such as high school students in biology class. The one in the picture above has two eyes, though in most pictures I've seen, the little guy has one eye. Some species are lone, some are male and female. 

Contemplating waterbears, I was thinking how comparatively fortunate, blessed, luck of the draw I am to have been created in the 20th century C.E. and living into the 21st, a human, male, white American Southerner in Bay County, Florida on StAndrewsBay; but the realization comes to me that, unlike us, nothing I've read suggests that waterbears hate like humans or fight to kill and exterminate each other like ants and men. Though some of the larger species do eat smaller species of waterbears. Well, we do that too, don't we. At any event, I suspect that they also are created in the image of God. 



T

with apologies, every time I typed "waterbears" the gardenia spell-check feature "corrected" it to "waterbeds". When I discovered that, I went back and re-corrected to waterbears, but I missed some, including in the title spelling taken up by Blogger. If spell-check ever comes knocking on my door, I'm going to exercise my stand your ground rights.