16 February 2016:
Lead researcher on the study, Dr Megumu Tsujimoto, is a SCAR Fellow from 2012 (see the Fellows page for details).
Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research have successfully revived microscopic tardigrades (also known as water bears or moss piglets) that had been kept frozen for more than 30 years. Tardigrades are tiny water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented creatures which grow to about 1mm in length and are capable of surviving in some of the world’s most extreme environments.
The study, published in the the journal Cryobiology, describes how a moss sample collected in Antarctica in November 1983, stored at −20°C, was thawed in May 2014. Two individuals and a separate egg retrieved from the thawed sample were revived, thereby providing the longest record of survival for tardigrades as animals or eggs (the previous longest records of revival after the long-term storage for tardigrades were nine years for eggs in dried storage at room temperature and eight years for animals in dried storage under a frozen condition). Subsequently, one of the revived tardigrades and the hatchling repeatedly reproduced after recovering from their long-term cryptobiosis.