Ariel Waldman

It looks as if someone sculpted this intricate jewelry in like triangles and circles and squares and star-like things.

It looks as if a human made them.

They're just so beautiful.

And I really wasn't ready for just that beauty and seeing that under the microscope.

I got really, really excited about that.

And it was something that...

made a big impact on me just in terms of appreciating just all the different life down there.

And that, well, charismatic life is often the stuff that's got arms and legs and moving.

There's also just, I mean, there's creatures made of glass, like all over the world, but also in Antarctica.

And they're utterly beautiful.

And just an appreciation for just how strange life is on earth, I think, is what it really drilled into me.

Yeah.

So different creatures have different mechanisms, but a lot of the creatures that I study, the microorganisms, have a way of going into suspended animation.

So with tardigrades, they go into like a ton state.

And, you know, what a lot of these creatures are able to do is they're able to expel all of the water in their body automatically.

and then come back to life when there's like enough water, enough oxygen, better temperatures around.

So if you could imagine as humans, squeezing us out, wringing out all the water from our body, and then pouring water back on us and expecting our form to come back and that we wouldn't be like just the most hideous, disgusting thing that you've ever seen.

That's essentially what tardigrades do and rotifers do it and nematodes go into a sort of suspended animation tooth.

So it's this combination of being able to expel water when it comes back, still have their body back in its form.

And a lot of that happens because of antifreeze like proteins and things that they have in their bodies that are able to preserve a lot of the basic structures that they need to pop back.