The Water Bear in the Abyss: Tardigrades and What They Reveal About Survival

I was deep into the research for To and Fro Upon the Earth when I first encountered them. Not in some sterile lab report, but while chasing the strange, glowing creatures that populate the hallucinatory depths Jay Adam encounters in a lifeboat. One in particular stopped me cold: a pinkish, eight-legged bear no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. Just a tube of flesh that shoots out like a proboscis. Officer Rahab floats there in the green gloom and says, almost casually, “That’s a tardigrade. Or kleiner Wasserbär—little water bear—if you prefer the original name.”

He explains it can live almost anywhere: ocean trenches, mountain peaks, even the vacuum of space. It shuts down for decades without food or water, then rehydrates and gets on with reproducing like nothing happened. I sat back from the screen and thought: Of course this thing has to show up in Jay’s story.

Because Jay’s story is one long test of what survives when order collapses.

You know the setup if you’ve read the book. Jay built a life of careful plans—big house, thriving business, family, integrity that actually meant something to him. “Everything works out as it should,” he tells Stella more than once. Then it doesn’t. The loss is total. Prison. Release into a world that feels both familiar and alien. And finally, that lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, where the sea and his own mind turn against him. In the depths of exposure and thirst, the hallucinations come. Officer Rahab appears, not as a judge but as a strange tour guide through the absurd beauty and pointlessness of deep-sea life. The tardigrade is just one stop on the tour.

I didn’t invent the science. I double-checked it the way I always do—multiple sources, recent papers, the skeptical eye of someone who lives half the year in the desert where life clings by the thinnest margins. Tardigrades enter a state called “cryptobiosis.” They lose nearly all their water, shrink into a tun, and drop their metabolism to almost nothing. They’ve survived being frozen to near absolute zero, heated past the boiling point of water, blasted with radiation that would kill us in minutes, and yes, exposed to the vacuum and solar radiation of space on actual satellite missions. Recent studies point to clever molecular tricks: proteins that shield DNA, pigments scavenged from bacteria via horizontal gene transfer that grab up free radicals, even phase separation that helps repair double-strand breaks faster. They’re not thriving in those conditions—they’re enduring them. There’s a difference.

That distinction is a key theme in the novel. Jay isn’t thriving in the lifeboat. He’s enduring. The tardigrade becomes a quiet mirror for his own suspended existence: desiccated, waiting, hoping the conditions will shift enough to allow rehydration. For Jay, that rehydration looks like meaning. Or at least the next small choice. The puzzle pieces he keeps trying to fit together—order versus chaos, planning versus randomness, integrity when no one is watching—echo the creature’s patient, almost defiant persistence.

Living occasionally here in the desert (and the stretches I spend on the water), I’ve seen the same stubborn clinging to life. Scrub that blooms after a rare rain. Barnacles on the hull that survive scraping and salt and sun. We humans like to think our resilience is special—willpower, character, cleverness. But the tardigrade reminds me it’s older and simpler than that. Sometimes survival is just refusing to die when the environment says you should.

Jay keeps asking, in his way, whether any of it has purpose. The novel doesn’t hand out easy answers. It sits with the question the way I sat with the tardigrade footage on my screen: awed, a little unsettled, and ultimately moved by the sheer fact that life finds a way. Not always a grand way. Often a microscopic, ridiculous, bear-shaped way.

I still smile when I reread that scene. Officer Rahab’s casual wonder at the “useless” creatures of the deep—Christmas tree worms, stargazers, the tardigrade itself—hits me differently now. Because nothing is truly useless if it survives. And survival, in the end, might be the first draft of meaning.

If you’ve wrestled with your own seasons of cryptobiosis—those times when you had to shut down just to make it through—drop a comment below. What pulled you back? What tiny, stubborn thing kept you going?

And if Jay’s journey through loss, endurance, and the search for order in the chaos resonates, I’d be honored if you picked up To and Fro Upon the Earth. It’s available wherever books are sold, or directly from my site. Let me know what you think. These conversations—over coffee, on the patio, or in the comments—are what keep the writing alive.

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