Over the past two weeks, our Spaced Out episode about the naturalist Mike Shaw and his love for tardigrades (which I like to call “space bears,” a sort of portmanteau of their other name, water bears, and their apparently singular ability to survive the vacuum and radiation of space) accrued so many comments on YouTube (upwards of 20,000) that we asked Mike if he wouldn’t mind answering some of the most exemplary (and not so exemplary) ones in person.
So Motherboard producer Erin Lee Carr and cameraman Dan Ferrara returned to the Virginia woods, where Mike hunts these amazing, bear-like creatures with his hands and his microscope – and slays those amazing, troll-like YouTube commenters with his wonderful woodsman demeanor.
