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Are Tardigrades Living Or Nonliving?

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Tardigrades: Living or nonliving? Tardigrades: the durable wonder of the animal kingdom. These nearly indestructible, microscopic organisms can be found just about anywhere in the world either in water or on moss and lichen plantation(1) Even though tardigrades prefer to live in a moist environment or on the surface of plants, they are not picky. Tardigrades are able to survive in the vacuum of space of space as well temperatures ranging from -200°C to 151°C.(2). There have been over 1,000 described species since this organism was discovered back in 1773 and there are more being discovered all the time.(3) The question is, are tardigrades living or nonliving? The first question that must be answered in order to answer the bigger question at hand is ‘do tardigrades grow and develop’? Tardigrades are different then most other organisms. Instead of growing through cell division, the cells of a tardigrade just grow in size. Tardigrades usually start out at a size of .5 mm, but they are able to grow to about 1 mm. (4) So, yes, tardigrades …show more content…

Since there are so many tardigrades in the world, they have to be reproducing somehow. Most tardigrades reproduce sexualy. The female will lay her eggs when she molts. The male will come along and inject his sperm into the egg.(6) In some species of their are actually no males. The female still lays her eggs the same way as any other species of tardigrade, but the eggs go through a process called parthenogenesis (4) where eggs double and divide their genetic material and then the two sets of identical chromosomes, compared, to sexual reproduction where the egg has one set of chromosomes and the sperm has another set(5). So tardigrades grow and reproduce, but are they alive? There are still four questions to ask before an answer can be arrived

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