Water Bears at 400x, Parts 1, 2, and 3 Released!
Reconstructed for the archive — this video never had a written companion, so I wrote one from the original footage with my own custom AI tools and a little good old-fashioned tweaking for accuracy.
All three 400x videos are out now, so here’s the recap in one place. Together they’re a follow-on to our series on hunting for water bears, where we get in close and pull some genuinely good footage of a tardigrade at 400x magnification — a step up from the earlier videos about collecting moss and finding tardigrades in the first place.
In part two we get an even better look at our water bear, name him Red, and dig into more of what makes tardigrades so amazing.
Part three is more of the same glorious tardigrade-watching, with Red on camera again. By the end I was getting noticeably better at keeping him in focus, and we walked away with some genuinely interesting footage of him swimming and trying to navigate the slide.
Sometime next week I’ll be combining all of our water bear and tardigrade footage into one 30-to-45-minute documentary that walks through the whole process in a single video. Hope you guys enjoyed the series, and as always, share any corrections or ideas for what we should look at next.
I'm Joseph Dattilo — engineer-founder in Lansing, Michigan, author of the FleetHarbor suite, and founder of Date Palm Media. More about me · More writing · Get in touch