As the Senior Nature Correspondent for the Porter Press, I tasked myself with finding the most interesting animal on the planet. And after fifteen minutes of thorough investigation I have concluded that the Tardigrade is quite possibly the coolest animal in existence. These eight-legged creatures are barely visible, at about the size of a poppy seed, and are often called water bears. Personally, I think they look more like a rolled up sleeping bag or a gross version of the caterpillar Heimlich, from A Bug’s Life. But it isn’t their bizarre look that makes the Tardigrade so awesome, it’s the fact that they’re basically indestructible. These tiny animals can survive without food for 10 years. They can even survive in boiling water, ice, the desert, the ocean, and even space. Also, they have been around for half  a billion years, outlasting just about any other living organism around today, and living through every mass extinction the planet has seen.

You’re probably on the edge of your seat by now, asking yourself, how can these tiny creatures endure such terrible conditions? And you probably won’t get any sleep until you find the answer. No need to fret. The key to the Tardigrade’s amazingness is that, when faced with extreme conditions, it can remove 97 percent of the water from itself and essentially stop its metabolism. This dried-up, raisin-like version Heimlich can then survive in essentially any conditions. Later, once exposed to water, it can rehydrate (remarkably without cool blue Gatorade) in minutes and go back to its party-animal lifestyle. This unique ability is what allows for the the Tardigrade to survive in space longer than George Clooney, my personal favorite of its arsenal superpowers. This power was discovered in 2007, making them the first animal with the ability to survive the exposure to the usually-deadly conditions of outer space. In fact, in 2014, Russian scientists actually found Tardigrades while cleaning a vessel of theirs in space; and they did not have much of a guess as to how they got there. Apparently these awesome creatures spend their free time taking long walks both on the beach and in space. If the ugly Heimlich isn’t impressive, nothing is.