Waterbear Movie Clip

Above, another 'photomicrograph' from Martin Mach's website about Waterbears. I beseech all readers to go here and click on the image of the waterbear in the center of the page. This will load a 12-second long, 1.06MB video clip of an eight-legged tardigrade walking across the screen. The creature you see is under 1.5mm long, and yet moves like some strange, full-sized creature one would stumble across in a mangrove swamp, snuffling at tree-roots.

Mach describes the video clip:

I think this one will be nice to look at in particular for children because they will see at once that some water bears in fact look like living sweets. The clip shows an Echiniscus mediantus water bear from an old roof in southern France. I have downsized it from my original 70 MB avi. There is some loss when compared to the original; the eyes in the original have a more intense red and the "body jelly" looks more fascinating.

...ah, yes, children will want to eat the waterbears when they see them. A summary of Tardigrade habitats:

The most convenient place to find tardigrades is roof mosses, where they live in the water films around lichens and mosses. Other environments are dunes, beaches, soil and marine or freshwater sediments, where they may occur quite frequent (up to 25,000 animals/l). Scientists have reported their existence in hot springs, on top of the Himalayas, under layers of solid ice and in ocean sediments. Many species can be found in a milder environment like lakes, ponds and meadows, while others can be found in stone walls and roofs. It is possible to spend some time in mushroom-smelling forests, scrutinizing mosses on rotten trunks in a search for water bears until coming to the conclusion that they can be found virtually everywhere.