I first learned of the existence of tardigrades, also known as water bears and moss piglets, at the 2019 Keene Central School Super Scientific Science Slam. Hunter Kelley’s intriguing display, “Extraordinary Tardigrades,” told the bizarre life story of these tiny segmented, eight-legged creatures. Astounded by the sight of a tardigrade swimming about under the lens of a microscope, I was entranced.

And to think that tardigrades are all around us, in moss and lichen, but also just about everywhere else there is water. They can withstand decades of dehydration as well as radiation, freezing, extreme heat, crushing pressure and even the rigors of space travel. Tardigrades have so far survived all five of earth’s mass extinctions.

Since 2019 I have never lost interest in tardigrades, and I have Hunter Kelley and the Super Scientific Science Slam to thank for it.

Recently, a small boy named Theodore asked me “If a tardigrade and a dust mite got in a fight, who would win?”

Even science writers are apt to say that tardigrades are cute, but no one to the best of my knowledge has ever called a dust mite cute. Still, in a fight, cuteness isn’t everything. A tardigrade is said to be about the size of the period mark at the end of this sentence and it has claws on all eight of its feet. A dust mite is slightly smaller; so, in dust mite vs. tardigrade, the tardigrade might have the advantage.

It wouldn’t come to that, though, because a tardigrade lives by sucking the insides out of plant, algae and fungus cells and exists in a watery environment, which means it is not in competition for food or territory with dust mites. It just minds its own business.

After I had explained all of this to Theodore I noticed that he had apparently lost interest and was mumbling a song to himself as he tried to put together some simple legos.

Never mind. On to Blarina brevicauda, the northern shrew! I have gleaned some new information since I last wrote about this creature.

Although it resembles a vole and is only slightly larger than a field mouse, the northern shrew is not a rodent; it is more closely related to hedgehogs and moles.

They are not what I would call cute; although Jupiter the cat once brought in a dead rat with part of its head gnawed off, and northern shrews are cuter than that.

Mainly nocturnal and nearly blind, they rely, like bats, on echolocation. They eat, voraciously, seeds, worms, grubs, insects, mice, other shrews, voles and salamanders, and they are aggressively territorial. I just learned that a northern shrew can eat up to three times its body weight in a day.

Northern shrews are, I just learned, not destructive to people’s gardens. A friend told me she was blaming northern shrews for “mowing through” her lettuce, only to catch a groundhog in the act of plundering her vegetables.

Shrews are armed with sharp teeth and a hemotoxic venom similar to that of the Mexican beaded lizard, a relative of the gila monster.

Jupiter and his cohort, the late Orangy, used to catch a lot of northern shrews but they didn’t eat them, due probably to a musky scent exuded by glands along the shrew’s flanks and belly that predators find distasteful. And it’s a good thing for Orangy and Jupiter that they weren’t bitten by their noisome prey. The bite of a northern shrew can cause pain and temporary paralysis but probably wouldn’t kill a healthy cat.

I had thought that shrews were the only venomous mammals, but no. I have just found out about the solendon, who lives in the forests of Cuba and Hispaniola.

No one is saying that the solendon is cute, but Google “Absurd Creature of the Week: The Mystery of Solenodon, the Mammal That Bites Like a Snake” by Matt Simon and look at the big photograph of the solendon in the article. It is so interesting and kind of creepy looking.

A distant relative of the shrew, the solendon is about the size of a guinea pig, with venomous saliva and glands that make it smell like a goat. It has a long, flexible snout like a tapir, and apparently it can echolocate like a bat.

Have a good week!

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)