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New study is a further testament to the hardiness of the water bear
The water bear is the cockroach of microbes; they nearly always pull through when researchers throw them into Armageddon-like conditions. Now it seems that even their unborn young have unprecedented endurance.
The microscopic animals called water bears already have quite a number of accomplishments under their belts. In experiments, they’ve survived the vacuum of space, large doses of radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold, and extreme pressure, giving scientists cause to believe that the little guys could potentially live on other planets and weather long journeys across space…
But to pull this off, they’d have to reproduce. Scientists have now exposed water bear eggs to three of these stressors—extreme temperature, vacuum, and a dose of radiation so strong that exposure to even a fraction of it would kill a human in days. They found that provided the eggs are given a chance to dehydrate themselves and go dormant, surprising numbers that survive: more than 70% of eggs for the temperature test, and more than 50% for the radiation test, while vacuum-exposed eggs hatched at similar rates as control eggs.
In the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole there is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Svalbard globale frøhvelv) the most secure seedbank of the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is designed to preserve the genetic diversity of the world’s food crops, an essential part of the work of preserving the world’s biodiversity.
The Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4,5 million different seed samples and each of these can contain on average 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2,25 billion seeds may be stored in Svalbard. When in full use it will be the world’s largest collection of seeds.
The seedban is constructed 120 metres inside a sandstone mountain. Svalbard is a unique location that was chosen because it has very specific features. It has perfect climate and geology for underground cold storage. Because of the permafrost, the temperature will never rise above minus 3,5 Celsius. The sandstone at Svalbard is stable to build in (its lacks of tectonic activity) and low in radiation. The seeds are stored and conserved in a frozen state at -18°C.
The vault could preserve seeds from most major food crops for hundreds of years. and some, including those of important grains, could survive for thousands of years.
