Learning by living?
We have been demonstrating in previous issues that tardigrades clearly show signs
of youth and age .
With increasing age obviously not only Homo sapiens tends to
become a victim of obesity and of attack by myriads of age pigment spots - tardigrades
apparently encounter similar problems.
On the positive side ageing implies growing, learning and sometimes even wisdom (admittedly, in rare cases :-).
We have been thinking about the question whether learning processes can be assumed
when looking at the behaviour of tardigrades as well. Movement characteristics
appear to be a good starting point for this endeavour, as some young tardigrades' movements remind of young dogs
jumping around and playing whereas older tardigrades apparently are cutting
down the the energetic luxury of quick, spontaneous movement.
With the genus Echiniscus we were not successful. Even the youngsters appear to move
smoothly and well-adapted to their environment, from the very beginning of their existence.
The more nervous, quickly moving maritime tardigrades looked more promising
with respect to our goal. And we suggest that the following observation
might be considered as a bit of evidence indicating learning processes:
Batillipes youngsters from time to time apparently have problems
to coordinate their "sticky" feet. Previously we had learnt
that each Batillipes foot has six toes each of which can start and stop some mysterious
glue secretion. When thinking about glue in general you will be able to
imagine that it might be quite a challenge to simultaneously control 8 x 6 = 48 moving
glue nozzles. And this is exactly the task which an adult Batillipes has
to perform throughout its whole life.
Just have a look at the video clip below in order to understand that this tardigrade youngster
has difficulties to fully master the job (top-right position in image, 1st and 2nd leg sticking together):
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