“…Tardigrades show extraordinary tolerance to physical extremes including high pressure (Seki and Toyoshima, 1998;Horikawa et al, 2009), UV and high energy radiation (Jönsson et al, 2005;Horikawa et al, 2006;Jönsson et al, 2008;Rebecchi et al, 2009Rebecchi et al, , 2011Persson et al, 2011), exposure to high temperatures (Doyère, 1842;Pouchet, 1859;Rahm, 1921a;Ramløv and Westh, 2001;Hengherr et al, 2009c) and exposure to low temperatures (Rahm, 1921b;Ramløv and Westh, 1992;Hengherr et al, 2009a, b;Guidetti et al, 2011a). Over the past few years, more and more emphasis has been placed on the genome (Schill et al, 2004;Förster et al, 2009Förster et al, , 2011aFörster et al, , 2011bGrohme et al, 2011), proteome (Schokraie et al, 2010(Schokraie et al, , 2011(Schokraie et al, , 2012Ya-maguchi et al, 2012) and metabolome (Kunieda and Kubo, 2006;Hengherr et al, 2008b;Beisser et al, 2012;Cesari et al, 2012) of tardigrades for a better understanding of the survival mechanisms. However, not much is known about their life-history traits, because only few species are in culture and life-cycle observations in nature are quite rare (Altiero and Rebecchi, 2001;Suzuki, 2003;Horikawa et al, 2008;Altiero et al, 2010;Lemloh et al, 2011).…”