This one is less of a story and moreso just me venting my tardigrade-based frustrations lol
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“Tiangou”
“Tardigrades are strange. Everyone knows that. And I suppose it’s nice enough that any microscopic animal at all gets as much recognition as the tardigrade does. But still, it does serve to leave a… Bit of a sour aftertaste in my mouth. I mean, most people only think there’s one kind of tardigrade out there. Like, THE tardigrade. You know the one, the one they use in all the pictures, big and puffy. But tardigrades are a whole phylum of animal! It’d be like saying “oh, have you heard of THE arthropod?” Or “Man, the chordate is such a cool animal!” I don’t know, it’s such a huge and overarching and diverse classification of animals that people just don’t appreciate enough. They don’t appreciate the bouncing Bubulubus, which floats around with its bundles of organic balloons. They don’t appreciate the delightful Doryphorus, dreaming under the protection of its built-in back dome. The little red Testudo with its trailing tendrils and ribbons. Sigismundi, Coronifer, Acanthophorus, oh, how I could go on! Alas, a good 99.999999999…(you get the point)% of these creatures will continue to be unknown and unheard of outside of the nichest scientific communities. While the lions and tigers and elephants and ants will frolic in the imaginations of children and storytellers, countless tardigrades may drift aimlessly through the microscope slides of laboratories and dusty old pages of academic journals. And, well, space, too, I guess. Hey, that’s pretty cool, right?”
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