Tardigrade egg

Because I like to end my blogging day with an interesting image.   Colorized scanning EM.  Here's another one:

At the via I found this comment:  "Tardigrades are born with the exact same number of cells as they have in adulthood. Their cells don't multiply during growth, they each just ... get bigger, as cells."

And finally this scan of a 50-hour old tardigrade embryo:

"One of nearly 1,000 species of hardy tardigrades, the Hypsibius dijardini embryo pictured above may have been the product of a sexless act of reproduction, its mother squirting her genetic material directly into eggs without bothering with any of the handful of males of her species for fertilization, according to the Encyclopedia of Life. That reproductive ability (called parthenogenesis), a genetic heritage largely unchanged through the generations, was her birthright and one she would likely have passed down to her children."

And BTW, there are tardigrades on the moon now.