Tardigraph · rebuilt from published data

An animal one sixth of a millimetre long, and everything inside it

Six works. All of them measured, none of them drawn.

All nineteen segmented organs shown together inside the translucent animal
Work 01

Nineteen organs

X-ray nano-tomography, 0.27 µm per voxel
one adult, fixed and dried
Gross et al., 2019

Every structure in this image was traced by somebody else, published openly in 2019, and then left alone. Rebuilding it took an afternoon. Nobody had.

The body is held at ten per cent opacity so the organs can be seen through it. Nothing here is illustration: each surface is the boundary of a labelled region in the original scan.

1,389cubic micrometres · the brain
1,386cubic micrometres · four ganglia, added
The nervous system alone: brain and four ganglia with paired connectives
Work 02

The chain

Volumes measured 2026
threshold: cord cut at 10 µm²
previously unmeasured

Four swellings, one to each pair of legs: 385, 430, 379, 194 µm³. The study that published the scan states that it did not measure them.

The fourth is half the size of the others and stays half the size however the cut is made. The four together come to three cubic micrometres less than the brain. We offer no explanation for that.

The animal cut across, the real X-ray slice shown on the cut face
Work 03

Section

The cut face is not a rendering
it is the scan itself

Where the animal is cut, the original X-ray slice is shown in place of a surface. The bright rings are storage cells.

We learned something making this: the published segmentation records the gut as a filled volume. The hollowness is in the scan, not in the labels.

A gene, switching on

Sixty-two embryos, each killed and sequenced at a known moment across four days. The genes that lay out the nervous system peak between 41 and 53 hours and then go quiet — twelve hours out of ninety-six.

Inside that window one gene rises 288-fold from almost nothing. It is this animal's counterpart of unc-86, which decides in a nematode which cells become which neurons. No gene of its family has ever been reported in any tardigrade.

What is not here

One animal, fixed and dried. Bulk expression from whole embryos, which cannot say which cells anything is in. Volumes that depend on a threshold, whose tolerance is published. And an orthologue, which is a reason to look rather than a result.