World's toughest bugs survive electron beam and vacuum

Rowan Hooper, news editor

(Image: Ishigaki and colleagues)

Tardigrades may just have lost their position as the world's hardest animals. Sure, they can survive the vacuum and UV radiation of space, but they have to be dehydrated to do it.

Not so these ticks. They have become the first organisms to be observed alive in a scanning electron microscope and survive the experience. In the video below you can see them moving their legs in a vacuum under an intense beam of electrons.

Naohisa Tomosugi of Kanazawa Medical University, Uchinada, Japan, and colleagues accidentally discovered that ticks (Haemaphysalis flava) could survive vacuum pressure when the animals crawled through dessicator tubes.

The researchers speculate that the ticks stop breathing whilst exposed to the vacuum. By exposing ticks to vacuum alone and vacuum plus electron beam, Tomosugi's team found that the beam does damage the ticks, but doesn't kill them outright. Intriguingly, they suggest that the animals could be a useful model system for biology of extreme conditions. Might we find something like this living on Mars or Titan?

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032676

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