Talk:Tardigrade/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 13:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Esculenta (talk · contribs) 21:24, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Happy to review this. I have a personal interest in this subject area and was planning on eventually working on the article myself, "after all of the lichens were done" (heh), but this way will be much more efficient! Comments in a few days. Esculenta (talk) 21:24, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks. Only 9991 lichens to go then ..... Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:11, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

That's a bit of an undercount, but something like that. Esculenta (talk) 17:20, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Spot-checks

• Initial source spot-checks reveal concerns about citation accuracy in this article. The citations appear to have accumulated through multiple edits over time without careful attention to their precise placement and support of specific claims. These is a list of issues from only the first section of the article (Description):
  • I've responded to all of these under 'Checked', mainly by boldly replacing the text and sources to resolve the issues with new (and far fewer) sources.
• "Most range from 0.3 to 0.5 mm (0.012 to 0.020 in) in length," not in cited source
• "The legs are without joints", "suction discs", "The cuticle contains chitin", none of these facts are supported by any of the three citations following this block of text.
• "In 1962, Giuseppe Ramazzotti [it] suggested that the Tardigrada be promoted to a phylum." the first source cited for this statement mentions that Ramazzotti "proposed" the phylum in 1962, but doesn't mention anything about "promotion" (which would imply that it was previously classified at a lower taxonomic rank)
  • Said proposed ('Taxonomy').
• "The eggs and cysts of tardigrades are durable enough to be carried great distances on the feet of other animals." not in cited source
• "The brain comprises about 1% of the total body volume." verified, but this study is based on a single species, Hypsibius exemplaris, so that should perhaps be mentioned
• "The brain is attached to a large ganglion below the esophagus" Not supported by the source. The paper does not describe a large suboesophageal ganglion. It describes a "ventral cluster" with only 25-35 nuclei mixed with muscle cells. "a double ventral nerve cord runs the length of the body" - Not explicitly stated in this paper. "The cord possesses one ganglion per segment" - Not explicitly stated, though the paper does discuss ventral ganglia. "each of which produces lateral nerve fibres that run into the limbs" - Not discussed in detail in this paper. "Many species possess a pair of rhabdomeric pigment-cup eyes" - Partially supported but with important differences. The paper states that many Eutardigrada and some Arthrotardigrada possess inverse pigment-cup ocelli, and describes them as having both microvillous (rhabdomeric) and ciliary sensory cells, not purely rhabdomeric. "numerous sensory bristles are on the head and body" - Not mentioned in this paper.
• "Tardigrades possess a buccopharyngeal apparatus, a swallowing device made of muscles and spines that activates an inner jaw and begins digestion and movement along the throat and intestine. this, along with the claws, is used to differentiate species." The Elzinga (1998) paper is focused on microspines in the alimentary canal across different arthropod groups, and while it discusses various digestive structures, it does not mention a buccopharyngeal apparatus in tardigrades or its use in species identification.

So about half of the statements in this section have dubious verifiability. I would suggest a more thorough audit of text-source integrity for the remaining citations. Let me know how you'd like to proceed. Esculenta (talk) 17:20, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Checked

Thanks for checking. I already removed about 40 refs and added 20. I'll go through the rest of the text in more detail from Brusca, i.e. I'll take this as authority to rewrite rather than continue struggling to revise. Will keep you updated with progress. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:49, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

'Description' - redone.

'Reproduction' - checked/reworked.

'Ecology' - redone.

'Environmental tolerance' - checked/reworked, slimmed down refs.

'Taxonomy - seems both of us have checked this.

'Evolution' - checked, slimmed down refs.

'Genomics' - checked, slimmed down refs.

'In culture and society' - checked, slimmed down refs. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:32, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Esculenta: ok, I've radically simplified the sourcing, rewriting some sections and checking the rest. Should be easier to review now, let's hope so. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:58, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

GA review and massive removal of content

Apologies if I enter the discussion without having a significant understanding of the GAN process. Reading the review above I do not see a clear justification for substantial removal of content such as in this edit, for example. Am I missing something? I am grateful that the reviewer noted how there was a need to align content with sources, and I am grateful to Chiswick Chap for their work; however I am concerned about what look like quite significant deletions of content from the article without a clear rationale. Thanks for your kind patience. cyclopia^speak! 17:34, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your concern for the article. However, in every case where I've removed something, I've also added something, and the latter is from a source I'm actually reading at that moment. The effect is to reduce the profligate mix of sources to something more manageable. Sources that have gone have been in several categories: low-quality chatty popular science websites; general news sites or newspapers (usable with care, but definitely second to actual research); multiple introductory overviews of tardigrades etc in general (we don't need a dozen of those all saying the same thing). I've also slimmed down the pop-sci look-how-amazing-tardigrades-are-they-can-survive-a-train-crash-at-17-zillion-mph materials as not telling the reader much that's scientific; instead, I've summarized tardigrades' robustness concisely from fewer sources. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:45, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Comments

My availability will be quite variable for the next few days, so I thought I'd leave some accumulated comments from first (re)read-through. I'm sure I'll have more to say later! Esculenta (talk) 22:40, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Description

• what variety of English is this in? (cf. haemocoel/colourless/moults (and molts)/sclerotised/miniaturized/reorganized)
  • British English: tweaked.
• perhaps haemocoel could be glossed with "open circulatory system"
  • Done.
• possibly useful links: cuticle, commissure, pharynx, eyespots, clavae, detritus, salivary gland, hindgut, duct, gonopore, oviduct, rectum, ovary, substrate, fertilisation
  • Done.
• is the suboesophageal ganglia referred to in the text equivalent to the subpharyngeal ganglion in the image?
  • Yes.
• what's the size range of tardigrade eggs?
  • Added detail.

Ecology and life history

• link cosmopolitan, parasites, commensals, polar, lipid, cytoplasm
  • Linked.

• things I'm left wondering about:

• their role in food webs: what predates on them

• Added.

• "More specialised habitats" seems quite interesting but unfortunately is only a short sentence long. Any more examples?

• Extended.

• anything about population dynamics, including any known population

• See next, which gives figures.

• fluctuations in response to environmental conditions; how population densities vary between different habitat types (the article currently only gives density figures for soil and moss)

• That seems pretty good for a general article really.

• biogeography: do certain tardigrade species commonly co-occur? are there some species that are found on all continents? Where is the most continental biodiversity known to occur?

• Added a paragraph on biogeography.

Environmental tolerance

• links: metabolism, environmental stress, morph, payload, microgravity, cosmic radiation
  • Done.
• "900 metres per second" "1.14 gigapascals" needs imperial conversions (for consistency)
  • Done.

Taxonomic history

• links: formal description
  • Done.
• Kleiner Wasserbär, Bärtierchen should be in lang template for best MOS practices
  • Done.
• C.A.S. Schulze Carl or Karl?
  • Both; K was his birth name, so C may have seemed smarter or more international perhaps.
• "set up the class" (x2) sounds a bit odd to my ear
  • Edited.

Evolution

• links: stem group, divergence, clade, dinocaridids, morphology (on first instance), body plan, molecular/genomic, sister, phylogeny, molecular marker
  • All done.
• "90 million years old" abbreviate mya here (it's used later on)
  • Done.

Genomics

• links: megabase pairs, generation time, cryopreservation
  • Done.

• how many tardigrades have had genomes sequenced?
  • It seems not many; apart from the two named, Milnesium tardigradum, and apparently few if any others as complete genomes; but it's hard to prove a negative.

• the Kamilari et al. (2019) is currently used to source a generalisation about trehalose, but it seems that some of the conclusions from the actual research presented in the paper might also be used to beed up this section.
  • Extended 'Damage protection proteins' using Kamilari.

• Also, doi:10.1111/ede.12457 could be used to illustrate how genomic studies across different tardigrade groups help reconstruct the evolution of their genome, and how genomic studies reveal pathways to miniaturization
  • Added; the latter is just a prediction in the paper. As the material fits well with the Hox gene discussion and diagram, I've merged the Hox material into 'Genomics' and moved that as a subsection of 'Evolution'.

• doi:10.1146/annurev-animal-021419-083711 this 2022 open access review by Arakawa has a section "History of tardigrade genomics" that could help beef up this brief section.
  • Added to 'Damage protection proteins'.

In culture and society

The quality of this section seems to drop relative to the other sections. It seems like a loosely organized collection of factoids. I'm not against having this sort of section (it seems particularly applicable to this group), but it would be better if addition scholarly sources could be used, and if there was an underlying thematic flow to the examples presented. A couple of source suggestions (found these by searching Google Scholar for: tardigrade "popular culture", but there's more):

• from doi:10.1080/00277738.2016.1169034 "tardigrada" a nomination for "Trade Name of the Year", and also "In Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson called Earth “the planet of the tardigrades.” "
  • Well, let's try that; it's also somewhat factoid, but the implication would be that we suppress the film/tv listicle, barring the Star Trek thingy which is already robustly sourced. Let's add the next items and then see what sense can be made of the remaining materials then.
• from "The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek" (2022), doi:10.4324/9780429347917-53, available here: "DSC’s first season incorporates Ripper, a ‘giant space tardigrade’. As Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin Green) explains, Ripper can “incorporate foreign DNA into its own genome via horizontal gene transfer. When Ripper borrows DNA from the mycelium, he’s granted an all-access travel pass” (DSC 1.05, 2017). Although this process is scientifically inaccurate, it still helped to elevate common knowledge of the tardigrade from Internet meme to a more generally recognisable animal (see Ch 56).1 The tardigrade became the subject of various explanatory articles thanks to DSC’s fictional interpretation of its unique real-world genetic properties in propelling both the show’s narrative and its spore drive".
  • Added ref.
  • Comment I don't know if it counts as more scholarly, but I added [1] for Sheldrake at one point and it was removed, possibly in a "one thing, one ref" - trimming. If memory serves, Tyson was in there at one point, but was removed as it read like "Tyson once mentioned them on a tv-show. ([2][3])" On Star Trek, isn't The Biologist ref scholarly enough? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:22, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
    • I guess what we're after is a 'red thread' that leads us through the section. W do have one such already, cited to both Brenner 2020 and Murphy 2023, the fact that their survival traits have made them popular; and we also have multiple RS for their "adorable" charisma. I've restored the Gilbert 2023 ref for Sheldrake, and added a quote from his song lyrics. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:14, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
      • You cut my Marvel, damn you! I still want to keep it, university press etc [4][5][6] (and NYT, of course) have noticed. Not sure the none-free Ripper pic will be allowed to stick, but good effort. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:38, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

        Many thanks. I've kept the strongest items, where there has been something of scientific interest to say about the entries, so as a) to delistificationise (thankyou, Mr Bush) the section, and b) to have something which is going to be of interest to scientific article readers. The goal as always is to provide the smallest possible number of examples to make the point (science of tardigrades has emerged into popular culture). We now have three examples which is close to the maximum one can have before listcrufticationiseration takes over, as a million articles amply demonstrate. I'm fairly used to defending NFURs, and am well aware of the predatory tardigradacious rampagings of the anti brigade. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:47, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Images

• File:Tardigrade anatomy.svg is there a text source for these anatomical details?
  • Reffed caption.
• might want to mention in the second video caption that's it's filmed using dark-field microscopy
  • Added.
• all images (including videos) appear to be licensed appropriately for use in Wikipedia (including the NFUR)
  • Noted.

Final comments

I read through the text again with a view to assessing the criterion 3 (broadness), and I think the article generally meets this. Here's a few suggestions for you to consider: Esculenta (talk) 23:49, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

• "They concluded that … tardigrades could be useful in space research." I think this understates things; there are several studies that explicitly state that tardigrades have already been quite useful in astrobiology, and some of them have been proposed as model organisms for this type of research (examples: doi:10.1016/j.pss.2012.05.021, doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.10.009, doi:10.1016/bs.ctdb.2021.12.008, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-67696-4_14, etc., and Gabriel et al. 2007 could be re-cited as well). This section on Environmental tolerance could be nicely wrapped up with a general statement summing up this utility.
• according to the most recent (43rd) "Actual checklist of Tardigrada species", there are now "36 families, 160 genera, 1488 species", doi:10.25431/11380_1178608
• doi:10.1016/j.biopha.2022.114063 this recent open-access review hints at future potential biomedical uses of tardigrade proteins with special properties. Perhaps worth a mention?
• there's an unexplained disparity between the publication date in the taxobox (1777) and the article text (1776)
  • Fixed.