Ariel Waldman

They can't survive, but then they get mummified.

So then...

There's not a lot, but there's a few carcasses around the Dry Valleys that have been mummified because it's so cold and it's so dry and there's no maggots or anything.

And so they don't decompose.

So you have these mummies of seals and penguins in the Dry Valleys that have been there decades and look as if they died a week ago or something.

So what does live in the dry valleys and what I based the Life on Earth series on is all of the micro animals.

So the tardigrades that look like gummy bears with claws and rotifers, which have these Roomba-like heads that they use to sweep in food, nematodes, which are tiny little worms that have different personalities, and cyanobacteria.

And so you have this whole

ecosystem where the dominant players are like some of the big tardigrades or the big lions or something.

And so I really wanted to make a nature series that featured micro animals as the big kings of the jungle, so to speak, in Antarctica, because in this region they are.

And you just don't see that in nature documentaries.

They don't usually show all of this microscopic wildlife that we're surrounded by all the time.

And so I'm trying to sort of showcase that there's a whole scale of wildlife that we're not used to seeing.

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, the temperature control is, it's not as difficult.

You know, you can keep them a little bit more cold and you can keep them happy like that.

The larger challenge is for a lot of traditional microscopy, you're putting little animals that have claws that use them to climb over moss and other things and you're putting them on glass because it's a glass microscope slide.

they do struggle a little bit.

So it's always a balance of trying to make a microscope slide that's clear enough that you can actually see the creatures and they're not embedded in soil, but give them enough of their environment there so that they can actually have their natural movements.

I mean, extremophile, you know, some people might argue it one way or another, but ultimately it really just means, can you survive an extreme environment that other creatures would struggle to survive in?