(LIVE SCIENCE) – Pudgy, ungainly tardigrades are among the smallest legged animals on Earth, and these microscopic water bears lumber around like chubby-thighed toddlers. But most creatures as small as tardigrades don't even have legs, so scientists recently analyzed tardigrades in motion to better understand how they use their limbs.
Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets, have segmented bodies and four pairs of legs. They scoot through deep sea sediments and sandy river bottoms, and scurry over lichens and moss on land, scampering toward prospective mates and food or away from predators.
Footage of scuttling tardigrades in the species Hypsibius exemplaris revealed that their movements closely resembled locomotion in insects about 500,000 times their size, despite being separated by around 20 million years of evolution and belonging to a different phylum. The step patterns of insects and other arthropods (invertebrates with segmented bodies and jointed legs) change when the animals speed up, and tardigrades' steps follow similar patterns when they walk faster, the new study found.
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