Life at The Limits: Showcasing Nature’s Weirdest Adaptations

From the indestructible tardigrade, which can survive the vacuum of space, to the axolotl, which can regenerate its limbs, a new collection at the American Museum of Natural History showcases the diversity of life at Earth's extremes.

"You might think of them as nature's very own superheroes," AMNH president Ellen V. Futter said at a press preview of the exhibition, entitled Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species, which will be open from April 4 until January 3, 2016. She also called the featured species "ambassadors of the great story of evolution."

"This exhibition really examines the power of natural selection and the amazing ways it has shaped the kinds of lifestyles that we show," added AMNH paleontologist Michael Novacek, who led a discussion with the exhibition's two curators, parasitologist Mark Siddall and ichthyologist John Sparks.

Indeed, the sheer diversity of lifeforms featured in the special exhibition is overwhelming. Some of the spotlighted species have evolved extreme adaptations, such as the insane weightlifting abilities of the Hercules beetle, which can pick up objects 80 times its own mass. Other species made the cut for their persistence in harsh environments. The waterfall climbing cave fish, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, falls into this category, as does the aforementioned tardigrade.

Indeed, the tardigrade—or the water bear, as it is colloquially called—was the unofficial mascot of the entire exhibit. Not only can it weather the punishing conditions of outer space, it can bounce back from being boiled, frozen, dehydrated for a decade, or subjected to intense pressure and radiation. As the shirt I bought at the AMNH store put it, "water bear don't care."

As a longtime admirer of the tardigrade's amazing arsenal of survival skills, it was particularly invigorating to behold the exhibition's massive sculptures of the microbe, which are about 6,000 times the average water bear's size. The tardigrade is pretty adorable for a microbe, and it was interesting to get a sense of what it would feel like to meet them on their own tiny scale.

But Life at the Limits isn't only about the familiar "greatest hits" of the extremophile world. Some of the most impressive species were ones I had never heard of, such as the ominously named black swallower.

This deep sea fish lives several miles under the ocean, where food is hard to come by. To get the most out of every meal that makes it down to these depths, the black swallower has evolved the ability to swallow 10 times its own body weight. This results in a delightfully freakish distended belly that puts all other alleged "food babies" to shame.

The exhibition also features a number of interactive displays, including a motion-sensing game that allows visitors to try out some of the extreme adaptations for themselves. During the preview, a group of kids was experimenting with the insane uppercut delivered by the mantis shrimp.

"It punches clams with the force of a .22 caliber bullet, so hard that water actually vaporizes, cavitates, and then snaps back with a force that generates light and heat," Siddall told visitors.

"We could have had it in there just for its sense of sight!" he added, referring to the mantis shrimp's expansive color vision. "It's got all kinds of superpowers."

The exhibition even has a few real live mantis shrimps on display in a small aquarium (spoiler alert: these crustaceans are beautiful). There were also aquariums housing real axolotls and nautilus mollusks. As cool as giant replicas of tardigrades and Hercules beetles are, nothing beats marveling over the species themselves.

The concept of "life at the limits" is a little vague, and as the curators pointed out, almost any species could be considered extreme under certain parameters. But the somewhat nebulous theme allows for every square inch of the new exhibit to be packed with extraordinary animals.

The collection could perhaps best be summed up by the words of the great Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, played by Jeff Goldblum: "Life, uh, finds a way." In its new exhibit, the AMNH has demonstrated just how flagrantly weird some of those ways can be.