Tardigrade

Tardigrades (/ˈtɑːrdɪˌɡreɪd/; also known as water bears or moss piglets) are water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals. They were first discovered by the German pastor Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. The name Tardigrada (meaning "slow stepper") was given three years later by the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani. They have been sighted from mountaintops to the deep sea, from tropical rain forests to the Antarctic.

Tardigrades are notable for being perhaps the most durable of known organisms; they are able to survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C), pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce. They are not considered extremophilic because they are not adapted to exploit these conditions. This means that their chances of dying increase the longer they are exposed to the extreme environments, whereas true extremophiles thrive in a physically or geochemically extreme environment that would harm most other organisms.

Thomas Wilde Boothby

Thomas Wilde Boothby (9 December 1839 – 19 June 1885), generally known by his full name, or as "T. Wilde Boothby", was a politician in the British colony of South Australia.

He was born the seventh son of Benjamin Boothby (1803–1868) and most likely named for his father's friend and benefactor Thomas Wilde, 1st Baron Truro. He worked as a commission agent and auctioneer.

He and his brother James Henry Boothby took up a lease on a property on the Coorong which they named Tintinara.

He was a member of the South Australian House of Assembly seat of Victoria from June 1873 to February 1875.

He moved from Naracoorte to Strathalbyn around 1873 and to Adelaide in 1874. His wife and two sons left Australia in January 1874. In 1878 he was declared insolvent.

He is perhaps best remembered as father of Guy Boothby (1867–1907) private secretary to Adelaide mayor Lewis Cohen, traveller and author with a significant career in England, and of Ben Boothby (1870– ), artist and companion on Guy's journeys, and also a writer of popular fiction, who completed several of his brother's unfinished stories, and illustrated others. He was by profession a land agent in Bloomsbury, London.