“睡美人”水熊虫冷冻续命？(上)

This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Ashleigh Papp.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是阿什利·帕普。

Imagine a little critter that isn’t quite an insect or an animal.

想象这么一个小动物，它既不那么像昆虫、也不那么像动物。

It’s about one millimeter in length, shaped like a gummy bear with eight legs and covered in tough, almost crunchy-looking scales.

它大约一毫米长，外形像一个小熊软糖，长有8条腿，外表覆盖着硬脆的鳞片。

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the tardigrade!

女士们，先生们，来见见这个缓步动物吧!

They basically look like, more or less, something between a worm and a bear with more legs.

大体上，它们看起来差不多像是介于多腿虫和多腿熊之间的物种。

They get the name water bears from their lumbering gait that—when they walk, they kind of sway from side to side, which is quite cute.

水熊虫得名于它们笨拙的步态——当它们走路时，它们会左右摇摆，非常可爱。

That’s Jessica Ehmann, a research scientist and former student researcher at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and she's pretty obsessed with the water bear.

这是杰西卡·埃曼，她是德国斯图加特大学的高级研究员，之前是该校的学生研究员，她对水熊虫非常着迷。

So that’s basically when I fell in love with the tardigrade, because it sat there under my binoculars, and it got up in the front of the body, and it was waving at me.

基本上就是在那时我爱上了这个缓步动物，它坐在我的双筒望远镜下面，在我的身体前站起来，它在向我招手。

Tardigrades have been around for even longer than the dinosaurs—by, like, 200 million years.

缓步动物存在的时间比恐龙还要长，它们大约存在了2亿年。

And over all of this time, they’ve developed some pretty nifty ways to survive harsh environmental conditions.

在这段时间里，为了在恶劣的环境下生存下来，它们发展出一种十分巧妙的方法。

When things get too dry or too cold, a tardigrade can lower its metabolism to nearly zero and go dormant for years.

当天气过于干燥或过于寒冷时，缓步动物的新陈代谢会降到接近零，然后休眠数年。

They take all their arms, and they pull them inside, and you can’t see their arms anymore; they just look like small tongues.

它们会把所有的手臂都收回去，你就再也看不到它们的手臂了; 它们看起来就像一个个小舌头。

And they, like, pull in all their extremities. And then they slow down their metabolism, basically, to a standstill.

它们把自己的腿都收起来后，新陈代谢会减慢，基本上接近停滞状态。

And then, when conditions are right again, they wake up and go on with their life, almost like Sleeping Beauty lying asleep for a century before her prince arrives.

然后，当条件再次变得合适时，它们就会苏醒，继续生活，就像睡美人在王子到来之前沉睡了一个世纪一样。

Here’s why that matters.

以下是这项研究很重要的原因。

Researchers are really interested in what happens to tardigrades while they’re in that dormant state, which they call “cryptobiosis.”

研究人员对缓步动物处于休眠状态(他们称之为“隐生”状态)时发生的事情非常感兴趣。

If nearly everything can be turned off and then, decades later, turned back on and fully functional, the tardigrade and its internal clock may hold the keys to that Disney princess hibernation palace that we’ve been searching for.

如果几乎关闭所有的一切，然后在几十年后，重新打开，各项功能完好，那么，缓步动物和它体内的生物钟可能掌握着我们一直在寻找的迪士尼公主冬眠宫殿的钥匙。

A previous study from 2008 by some of Ehmann’s colleagues at Stuttgart investigated how long tardigrades can survive in crazy dry conditions.

2008年，埃曼与斯图加特的一些同事进行了一项研究，研究缓步动物在极端干燥的条件下能存活多久。

So Ehmann took a similar approach. But this time, she turned the temp down—like, subzero down.

埃曼采取了类似的方法。但这次，她把温度调低了——调到了零下。