A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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tardigrade
A tardigrade is a microscopic eight-legged animal, under a millimeter long, that lives in moss, lichen, leaf litter, soil, and sediment nearly everywhere on earth. It walks slowly on clawed legs and feeds by piercing plant and algal cells. Its reputation rests on what it does when conditions fail: it curls up, expels its water, and enters a suspended state in which it can survive freezing, boiling, vacuum, and radiation.
Etymology
The name is Latin for slow-stepper, given by an Italian naturalist in 1777 for the deliberate way it moves. The German name given a few years earlier was wasserbär, water bear, which is the name almost everyone uses and which is a better description of the shape and the gait. English uses both.
Notes
The suspended state is cryptobiosis and it works by replacing the water in the cells with a sugar that sets to a glass and holds the structures in place. Tardigrades in that state have been taken to orbit and exposed to vacuum and solar radiation and revived afterward. They are not indestructible while active, which is a distinction most accounts leave out; a hydrated tardigrade is a soft animal that dies as easily as anything else.