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The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death

At the dawn of microbiology, scientists glimpsed unseen worlds and stumbled into a philosophical purgatory

“In a short time afterwards they began to extend their bodies, and in half an hour at least a hundred of them were swimming about the glass …” As a good experimentalist, he repeated the process by drying out other rotifers and witnessing the same phenomenon numerous times—even after samples were desiccated for a month. In the 1770s, Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani burrowed even deeper into the philosophical ramifications of this physiological phenomenon, which by then scientists had learned also included tardigrades, microscopic “water bears” (tiny animals that researchers have since discovered can survive not only desiccation but also radiation, extreme temperatures, and even the vacuum of outer space). Van Leeuwenhoek’s original observations of their strange microscopic world sounded like fantasy to other naturalists at the time, influencing his staunch empirical approach to science and his advocacy of visible evidence for phenomena over philosophical reasoning.

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