Courtesy of National Geographic

My friends, I would like to bring attention to one of the most amazing and least known of all of God’s creatures. The fat little bugger in this photo is a water bear (of the phylum tardigrada, also known as a moss piglet) and are sorta like wormy little bugs that live in pond scum and only about 1 millimeter in length. They are one of the coolest and weirdest critters I’ve ever studied, so when my biology teacher said we had to pick an animal to do a presentation on, I picked the water bear.
Now water bears are extremophiles, meaning these little fellows equal about 40 Bear Grylls when it comes to awesomeness. Water Bears can live pretty much anywhere, and when I say anywhere I mean ANYWHERE! Moss Piglets have been found on the top of the Himalayas, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and the middle of the dry desert (one little 120 year old piglet was found alive and still kicking in a patch of dried moss in the middle of the Sahara).
They can radiation levels 1000 times stronger then any other animal, they can be dehydrated to a mere 3% of their water composition, and they even survived being heated to a sweltering 304 degrees F, frozen to temperatures at -458 degrees F, less then a single degree above Absolute Zero (which mind you, is the theoretical temperature at which the atoms themselves stop moving).
Water bears are so tough we’ve even shot them up into the freezing vacuum of space to see if anything could kill them. Guess what? Those hardy little beasties went 10 whole days in dead of space where there’s no oxygen, no pressure keeping their little organs intact, no moisture, temperatures as low as -290 F, and a whole gazantaton of space radiation blasting into their flabby little bodies. And guess what? They all came back in just as good shape as they went out in.
Forget cockroaches! If its a nuclear wasteland, I’m going to be a water bear! Only God could design such a strange and magnificent animal!