– The bear animals surpass everything here on Earth, says Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen, professor emeritus at the Statens Naturhistoriske Museum, to Videnskab.dk.
The bear animals’ secret is that they can go into “anhydrobiosis”, a kind of hibernation where they dry up and lose almost all of their body fluid.
In this condition, the bears can live almost without oxygen, withstand high amounts of radioactive radiation and even tolerate being frozen for years without dying.
Bears are found in almost all kinds of environments, from mountain tops to eight kilometers deep in the sea and even in holes deep in the ice sheet in Greenland.
In addition, bears have survived a trip on the side of a space rocket.
Where bears survive extreme cold by letting themselves dry out, certain hardy armor mites have found another solution to the frost problem.
– The armor mites are subcooled instead. They avoid ice formation, but can withstand the same low temperatures, says Professor Martin Holmstrup from the Department of Biology at Aarhus University.
Researchers have previously found an armor mite that survived being spun twice at 3,000 rpm. minute, “drowned” in alcohol and stored in the refrigerator for months.
Armor mites can encapsulate and protect the front body in their armored hind body, hence the name.
On the other hand, turtles may not be the first animals that come to mind when you think of hard sneezes. But two subspecies of marsh turtles have been shown to hold up to a bit of each: red-eared terrapin and yellow-eared terrapin.
Unlike most other vertebrates, the marsh turtles can survive without oxygen for months.
– They overwinter under the ice during the winter in the North American lakes, where they lie without oxygen and cope with a very large acidification, says Tobias Wang, professor at the Department of Biology at Aarhus University.
In fact, there is a single group of animals that can live completely without oxygen.
The corsets are a series of microscopic sea creatures that live between the grains of sand on the seabed worldwide.
In the Mediterranean there is an underwater lake of liquid salt without oxygen, and here the corset animals have adapted. They have replaced the mitochondria, which are the structures in the cells that are responsible for oxygen uptake.
– It should be impossible. The corsets have replaced the mitochondria with hydrogen bacteria, which they absorb and can breathe with, because there is no oxygen down there, says Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen.
Science still knows very little about corsets, which have evolved very rapidly.
– It is absolutely amazing how fast it has gone. It has not been more than 70 million years since the Mediterranean opened, so the assumption that evolution takes several hundred million years … It can go much faster, says Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen.
Source: The Nordic Page