I just received a memo from my inner astrophysicist reminding you all that this Saturday, March 19th the moon will be rising at 7:37 PM while at perigee, meaning the full moon will be 14% bigger and 30% brighter than it normally appears. Also, while we’re on the subject of outer space, let’s talk pine beetles, Arnold Schwarzenegger and water bears. Trust me it’ll all make sense in a minute.
Ironically, I don’t remember much about 1990 sci-fi flick “Total Recall” other than peoples’ eyeballs blowing out of their heads due to Martian atmospheric decompression and a woman that had three breasts (give me a break, I was 14 when it came out). Even the pre-governing Guv’enator was no match for the vacuum of space, a place where humans excel at shriveling up and dying. The image of Arnie’s bulging peepers is so deeply engrained in my memory, if I’m lucky enough to live to a ripe old age it will be one of the last visions to fade from my mind — right after that angry ostrich that nearly bit off my thumb when I was six years old. “Feed the ostrich, he won’t bite,” they said. That was the last time I trusted adults.
But I digress. And I’ll digress some more.
Let’s jump over to planet Earth and our humble state of Colorado, where ravenous pine beetles have been munching away at our coniferous trees for the better part of a decade now. Conventional wisdom has so many folks saying “It just needs to be cold enough to freeze ‘em to death” as if we were procuring advice from a wizened local spinning dry facts from the front porch of a Maine bait shop. Well, this was a mighty cold winter in the mountains, cold enough to freeze the bananas off a brass baboon but I have reason to fear that our beetles have become super-beetles. And I blame it on the humble water bear.
Water bears are, of course, ridiculously sturdy invertebrates known to the nerds who study them as “tardigrades”. To summon another film from the Arnold opus, water bears are like the bad terminator – you can pound them, boil them, expose them to blinding amounts of radiation and they’ll keep on ticking. No water? Pffff… who needs it? Oxygen is for suckers. Water bears are one of the few living things that can be rehydrated if they dry out too much, as if being completely void of vital liquids was a mere inconvenience. And as it turns out, the airless abyss of space is no big deal either.
In this article about Water Bears in Space from New Scientist water bears were able to live in space for 10 days with no major detrimental effects. Granted, they may have the advantage of their eyeballs not exploding due to the fact they don’t appear to have eyeballs but still – that’s impressive! (A quick Internet search reveals they do have rhabdomeric pigment-cup eyes. Duh, I should have known). Experiments first carried out in 2008 then repeated earlier this year confirmed that a lack of atmosphere doesn’t phase these robust tardigrades.
And onto the bigger point: nature is a lot tougher than we humans. To think that a chilly spell in January would exterminate the pine beetle threat is foolish and sadly, evidence is already showing the winter wasn’t icy enough to freeze off the buggers. Perhaps if science was to create a breed of pine-beetle eating water bears we’d be in better shape but as a lot of really bad sci-fi movies from the 50s teach us, messing in mother nature’s domain has its own set of consequences. For all we know, water bears might mutate and become rulers of the world, a place where even steroid-fueled, pseudo politicians are helpless to fight off the invincible powers of hyper-evolved tardigrades. On the plus side, the uber-water bears would probably eat Sarah Palin.
I guess my point is, if you want something to ponder while gazing at the jumbo moon on Saturday, it’s that nature will continue to have more tricks up her cosmic sleeve than we could ever guess. And if you go out onto the Martian surface, please keep your helmet on.
