A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
cryptobiotic
Cryptobiotic describes an organism in a state where all measurable metabolism has stopped and it is neither functioning nor dead. Tardigrades, rotifers, brine shrimp eggs, some nematodes, and the resurrection plants can all do it. Dried, frozen, or deprived of oxygen, they shut down completely and can hold that state for years, in some cases decades, and then rehydrate and resume as though nothing happened.
Etymology
The word is Greek for hidden life. The mechanism is stranger than the name suggests. Many of these organisms replace the water in their cells with a sugar called trehalose, which sets into a glass and holds the cell’s structures in place while there is no water to support them. The Latin term for the dried state is anhydrobiosis, life without water.
Notes
Tardigrades in this state have survived being taken to vacuum and radiation in low earth orbit. Rotifers have been revived from moss in herbarium specimens collected over a century earlier. Cryptobiotic crust uses the same word for something different: the living soil crust of the Desert Southwest, named for the organisms in it being hidden rather than for any suspended state.