Reader Q&A: Our natural history writer Patrick Barkham is answering your questions on invertebrates – live

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Goldgreen asks: I’ve just read that there have been tardigrades on the Moon since 2019. I’d like to know how they’re getting on.

Patrick:

Great question, and a fantastic story about last year’s runaway winner of Invertebrate of the Year, the virtually indestructible tardigrade, or water bear.

In 2019, an Israeli spacecraft crashed into the moon while attempting the first privately-funded lunar landing. On board was the “Lunar Library”, a DVD-like disc holding around 30 million pages of texts and images. Tucked between sheets of nickel were several thousand dried tardigrades. Earlier studies have shown that dehydrated (dried) tardigrades can be exposed to outer space, brought back to earth and revived. So tardigrades can survive space but did they survive the crash?

Woodlice live alongside us so we have many amazing names for them across human cultures without perhaps knowing a huge amount about them. (I speak for myself!)

There are actually more than 5,000 species of woodlouse but the one we know in Britain best is Oniscus asellus, which can curl up in a ball. Another common woodlouse species, the common rough woodlouse, Porcellio scaber, which is more widely found in the US and Australia, doesn’t.