Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/30/tardigrades-now-more-popular-than-in-1835.html
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Go, tardigrades!
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I found some moss patches on a walk. I got a few petri dishes and plan to save some moss and then hopefully can use my digital microscope to fine some.
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Some of the rise in popularity may be due to the first season of Star Trek: Discovery (2017) using them as a “not alien” creature?
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Dunno, but Wikipedia is no help. Like Tardigrades themselves, the Wikipedia entry on “Tardigrades in popular culture” has survived in an environment that’s proven remarkably hostile to “in popular culture” sections in recent years. But unfortunately, Wikipedians think popular culture is limited to things that were created after Wikipedia itself.
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What was the great Victorian tardigrade novel?
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Where is it on the baby name lists?
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The search tools were no help. I just got an ‘I am not a mammal’ link, with a 4x4 grid of pictures of moss…
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Where it gets really creepy and the SCP foundation gets called in is when we discover that the string ‘tardigrade’ is as atypically resilient with respect to other strings as tardigrades are with respect to other eukaryotes; and the increase in concentration is actually a product of other strings being unrecoverably corrupted at higher rates than ‘tardigrade’ is.
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It was “The Man with the Broken Ear”, by Edmond About.
“Romola” by George Eliot doesn’t count, as it only uses ‘tardigrade’ as an adjective.
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Wow. You fucken found it! And it is exactly what I’d hoped.
The ceremony began. The
choir was filled with tardigrades and rotifers as large as men and
dressed like choristers: they intoned, in solemn measure, a hymn of the
German composer, Meiser, which began thus:The vital principle Is a gratuitous hypothesis!
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The fact that there’s someone on hand to answer “what was the great Victorian tardigrade novel?” and there’s a project Gutenberg link is genuinely emotionally affecting.
This is the sort of cool and crazy stuff that we used to talk about the internet making possible; back before it devolved into (admittedly powerful) IT utility stuff and a morass of sordid monetization schemes.
Thanks.
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Great tardigrade article. To answer your question- it was James Murray the famous biologist and explorer who gave tardigrades a resurgence. And yes, there was a book - called Antarctic Days. And Murray’s strange disappearance in the jungle. You can see the 2017 movie - Lost City of Z which shows this! My website shows you the James Murray Poster (and my short video) that got the tardigrade resurgence going in the 1800s. Blogpost is tardigrada-of-the-scottish-lochs
More info on my tardigrade website.
Thanks!
Mike Shaw
The Space Bear Hunter
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Great tardigrade article. To answer your question- it was James Murray the famous biologist and explorer who gave tardigrades a resurgence. And yes, there was a book - called Antarctic Days. And Murray’s strange disappearance in the jungle. You can see the 2017 movie - Lost City of Z which shows this! My website shows you the James Murray Poster (and my short video) that got the tardigrade resurgence going in the 1800s. Blogpost is tardigrada-of-the-scottish-lochs
More info on my tardigrade website.
Thanks!
Mike Shaw
The Space Bear Hunter
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How could you resist them? They’re just so cute.
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