On the first day of filming, a small crew set up in my parents’ house in Long Beach, California. We were shooting a short documentary about my parents’ experiences as Vietnam War refugees who were used as background extras in Apocalypse Now nearly 50 years ago. Though my parents played a variety of characters — translators, Viet Cong, drivers, POWs — they had no face time and no speaking parts. Director Francis Ford Coppola sought to authenticate his film by hiring Vietnamese extras. My parents were cast as background characters in a story they lived. We hoped the documentary would shift perspective, foregrounding their stories instead.  

In the kitchen, I interviewed my mother. We’d always had an easy relationship. Though we had to schedule around her daily work, this part felt straightforward. It felt like every other conversation I’d ever had with my mother.

I was nervous about my father’s participation, though. While he was also open about his life, our relationship was strained. I was his adult daughter, a writer born in the US and accustomed to speaking my mind; he was a patriarch who grew enraged when I voiced opinions that didn’t match his. Our relationship was still recovering after my father said he’d disown me for a third time. Now, we said little to one another beyond hello and goodbye. My father agreed to the interview, but I wasn’t sure what would happen. 

I’d primed him about what to expect, but when he returned home from work and saw the lighting and camera setup, he exclaimed in Vietnamese, “What is all this? I have nothing to say. My life isn’t important.” 

From what we knew, no video-documented first-person accounts by extras from the set of Apocalypse Now existed. We were trying to include stories of Vietnamese people who were set on the margins by this film. My father’s story was important. But how would I be able to explain this to him?

I looked nervously at the crew. I had scheduled a week for production. I’d received grant funding, flown the director and cinematographer out from New York, budgeted for food, and figured out housing. We’d already shot in Vietnam and the Philippines two months before. If my father wasn’t going to participate, how would we make our film?

My mom walked in from the kitchen and intervened: “It’s for a school project! Just go along with it.”

Inside, I chuckled. It wasn’t for a school project. I hadn’t been in school for years. But this was my mom’s way of making this project comprehensible to him.

My father nodded, still scowling, and shuffled into the bedroom to change out of his work clothes. When he emerged and spotted the crew, his demeanor changed. He might be fine challenging his family behind closed doors, but he didn’t want to appear difficult in front of others. He smiled, introducing himself, shaking hands, playing the warm host. 

The sound recordist affixed mics to my parents’ shirts. My parents sat down on the living room couch. We turned on the television and played a scene from Apocalypse Now. Their narration was, at times, sad, but also funny, punctuated with laughter as they spoke about a time nearly five decades prior. I relished in my parents’ communal storytelling, the way they completed each other’s sentences. It felt like our dinner table conversation.

On the television screen, we saw two Vietnamese women shooting machine guns into the air. 

Pointing at the screen, my father said, “At that time, your mother wore clothes like a…”

“…Viet Cong,” replied my mother, laughing. 

My father chimed in, “She was holding an AK-47, shooting up at US helicopters!”

My mother nodded. “I was so scared. I stuffed cotton into both of my ears.”

I wrote insistently about my family because the world outside of my home — the school, library, television, radio, movie theater — lacked their voices. This erasure felt painful, and I sought to make the world outside of my home my home, too. This became a focus of my art. Yet I rarely felt comfortable sharing my work with my family, especially my parents. I wrote in English; they spoke Vietnamese. And anyway, I wasn’t sure that they fully understood what I was doing as a poet, children’s book author, and now, filmmaker.

My parents vaguely understood that I was a writer. When I told my mother that I was getting an MFA in poetry, she didn’t quite understand what I was doing until I explained that the degree would allow me to teach at the university level. When my first essay was published in an issue of Poets & Writers, I showed my father a print copy of the magazine, and he declared, “Wow, that woman is so old!” The cover featured Joan Didion. When a few of my poems were translated from English into Vietnamese and published in one of the main newspapers in Vietnam, my cousin forwarded a link to my father. His only comment to me was, “You know, in Vietnam, poems rhyme.”

When my private writing and artmaking began to become public, I was faced with the question of bringing my ambitions into my family’s life. What seemed naturally like a process of self-definition, of carving out a space where my family was no longer being erased from the external world, was also freighted with questions about power, duty, and responsibility. Was I writing about my parents out of love, or was I extracting their stories from them to make a career in art?

Once, after I’d written about my father’s explosive anger, he told me that I had a poetic way of exaggerating the truth. “You haven’t experienced war first-hand,” he told me. “Do you know what an explosion can do?”

I didn’t. But I did know how it felt to be my father’s daughter, and I knew what it felt like to experience the war secondhand, through his stories and through him. I knew what it was like to be silenced. And I didn’t want to choose silence. 

My father told me once, “You’re my daughter. Your job is to look down and say yes.” When I told him I couldn’t fulfill that role, he said, “From here on out, you’re not my daughter.” He didn’t show up for Thanksgiving that year. 

Being disowned by my father was excruciating. I cried for years and felt at a loss for what to do or how to be in a world where my father, the subject of so much of my writing, wouldn’t speak to me. 

For my project, I also faced a dilemma: I no longer had access to one of my main interview subjects. I’d devised this art project as a way of understanding myself and my family. Suddenly, I didn’t know how to be around him. During those years, I faced the question of what it meant to write my father’s story without him in my life. 

So I wrote poems in a speculative mode, wondering, Who are we to one another when we are no longer in each other’s lives? I wrote poems in his voice, trying to understand him as a fully dimensional person. These poems would become an important braid in my collection Becoming Ghost.

Bomb that tree line back about a hundred yards. Give me room to breathe.
a golden shovel
Daughter, I think you embellish what you don’t know. A bomb
is nothing like a slammed door. That
is just your poetic imagination. Have you seen a tree
disappear into flames? That’s what a bomb can do. I taught you, line
by line, my own poetry. It was a song back
when I went hungry. Your grandmother died when I was about
to turn ten. I became an orphan then. I made sure that you never went without a
meal. I taught you to count to one hundred
in Vietnamese. You played in backyards,
on swing sets, bright shards of grass at your feet. I tried to give
you the safety I never had. And now, you tell me
that you are afraid of me? You lock yourself in your room
and write my story. I’m here, waiting to
be acknowledged. Can you hear me breathe?

For years, I continued to write about my parents’ lives as a way to understand them and our rift. Though I was deeply sad, I felt empowered to write about my parents, understanding that our stories overlapped, that I also had a right to tell these stories. Eventually, my mother stepped in and brokered a fragile peace between my father and me. It made our family gatherings less awkward, but there was still an uneasy tension in the air. We would deliberately avoid one another in order to prevent another confrontation. When I met Chris Radcliff, who would become the director and editor of the film, things between my father and me were still stiff. When Chris asked if I might consider making a documentary about my parents’ involvement in Apocalypse Now, I was taken by the idea of making a short film but anxious about what it would entail. I knew my mother would agree to it, but I was afraid of my father’s reactions.

At the dinner table, I asked my father, “Can I film you? I’m doing a project about you and mom playing extras on the set of Apocalypse Now. You’d just tell your story.” 

My father shrugged and replied, “Whatever you want.” 

He resumed eating. I was relieved. 

After we wrapped and completed postproduction, friends would ask what my parents thought of the film. They kept insisting that my parents must be so proud. Proud? I thought. I hadn’t considered sharing it with my parents, and I hadn’t considered the idea that my parents would ever tell me that they were proud of me. 

But an editor for USA Today asked me to write up a piece about our watching the film together for the first time, and I agreed to do it.

On Christmas Day, we assembled as a family to open gifts and to eat dinner. I suggested that I screen the film. We all watched it together in the living room. While my brothers and oldest nephew were rapt and curious, my parents watched silently. I recorded their reaction on my phone. I was pleased by my brothers’ responses and waited anxiously to see what my parents would say. I couldn’t imagine them saying they were proud of me, or congratulations. But, maybe I was wrong? Maybe they’d surprise me. 

Once we reached the credits, my mother clapped her hands together and said, “Okay, time for dinner!”

My parents said nothing else about the film that night. Instead, the family admired my mother’s gorgeous Christmas turkey, stuffed with sticky rice and Chinese sausage. We took photos of my mother’s achievement. She spent the evening serving others while the rest of the family ate, and we complimented her cooking for the remainder of the meal. I realized that this was my mother’s great art, not just the delicious food but the way my family gathered around it.

Eventually, we would screen the film, We Were the Scenery, at festivals to different audiences who had the chance to feel the pleasure of sitting with my parents in the living room as they told me their stories. My brothers attended the premiere at Sundance and were there when we won the short film award.

Still, that evening, it did sting a little, my parents’ total non-reaction. I had made the film to honor them, perhaps even to save them from narrative erasure. But that night, I realized that my parents didn’t feel particularly honored, and they certainly didn’t feel like they needed me to save them. Their lives were full of their own stories. For my parents, storytelling was a way for their children to understand who they are and where they came from. They participated in my interviews out of love for me. They understood their participation in my poetry and film as something that I wanted. Our storytelling has different priorities and different aims. I realized that I made the film for me and for people like me — people who felt the importance of this story in a world where it was not available. 

The film didn’t have a strong effect on my parents because they didn’t need it. As we ate dinner that night, I could see that my parents didn’t feel my sense of their marginalization. They were already the stars of their own lives.

Here’s a post on Reddit:

Yes, a guy wanted to know where he could dig a big hole in Durham. Just because.

What is it with guys and digging holes? Back in 2022, Vice looked at the trend of grown men who dig for … fun? I mean, I’ve dug plenty of holes in my life. I help my kids dig some little holes on the beach (we fill them in, because you really, really should). I make holes to plant trees or shrubs. But I can’t say that I’ve come home after a long day’s work, cracked open a cold one, and gone off into the back yard to see how deep I can go.

(For what it’s worth, if you were able to dig a hole straight down from North Carolina to the other side of the earth, you wouldn’t pop up in China. You’d pop up on the soggy floor of the southern Indian Ocean.)

In the story, the reporter for Vice talked to Dr. Jacob Hirsh, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto who has researched the differences in personality between genders. He can sort of understand why boys dig holes. “Using one’s strength to achieve a personal challenge could be rewarding for anybody, but the idea of a strong individual who can gain mastery over their environment is particularly congruent with masculine gender norms,” he told Vice. “Something about a man working the land with a shovel appeals to a basic sense of rugged male individualism, a feeling that can be fleeting in our modern lifestyles.”

In short: Dudes rock.

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Back to the Durham hole thing. This drifted into my feed about a month back, and it seemed like a pretty simple question with no clear answer. Where would someone be able to just go dig a hole in Durham? To be clear, there’s a lot of dirt being turned over in that town to make way for apartment complexes, new homes, craft breweries, and so on. But there seems to be no Durham chapter of the Hole Digging Club. Yes, those clubs are actually real.

holesoc.sta

A post shared by @holesoc.sta

Some people suggested helping out with a purpose-driven hole, like a ditch or a rain garden. A lot of folks made jokes about Minecraft and Camp Green Lake and body burying. And a few folks concern-trolled the original poster, talking about the very real danger of collapse in a hole that’s five feet or deeper. Others, like your dad, pointed out that liability insurance would probably prevent anyone from legitimately allowing a stranger to dig a deep hole for absolutely no reason.

Nobody, however, answered the question. Nobody found a good place to dig a big hole in Durham.

So I chimed in:

Not in Durham, but a long time ago I went up to the Emerald Hollow Mine in Hiddenite and they had a dig site where you could dig your own holes to find emeralds. I tried it. Found nothing, but I got to dig some holes. It's still there if you all want to take a drive: https://www.emeraldhollowmine.com/diggin

The original poster replied to say it was a great suggestion. And then I moved on. I try to be helpful when I can, but (I swear to you) I’m not always out here strip mining the internet for story ideas. So, I just forgot about it for a few weeks.

But earlier this month, the hole thing popped back into my head. I wondered if the guy ever went out and did his big dig. He did! He told me via private Reddit message that he took a day trip up to Hiddenite with some friends. And yes, he said, they dug a big hole. I told him that I was happy to hear it, and that I’d love to see some pictures if he didn’t mind.

He didn’t reply. Then yesterday, I found out that he’d done more than just take pictures. He created an entire 28-minute-long video essay about it on YouTube:

Folks, I’m old now. I don’t understand the youths like I once did (if I ever did). But I am very aware that there are very famous and well-known people who have large, loyal followings on YouTube. I am also aware that, aside from MrBeast, I do not know many of them.

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Hence, I had never heard of Jacob Geller, who is prominent enough to have 1.3 million followers on YouTube along with his own Wikipedia page. I also did not know that he lives in North Carolina. And nobody seemed to know that Geller was the Redditor looking for a hole to dig because he wanted to wax philosophic about … holes.

But yes, Geller was the original poster, and had taken my advice to visit Hiddenite, which the video confirms:

If you want to understand Geller’s philosophy of hole-digging, you should watch the video. I’ll try not to spoil it here. But! Geller had been interested in the topic for a while. He wound up playing Minecraft and a video game about digging a hole titled, intriguingly, A Game About Digging A Hole. That led him to try digging a real-life hole in his own backyard in North Carolina, which was less than satisfying. He hit red clay pretty quickly, along with roots, which he referred to as “the rebar of the earth.” So he took up my Reddit suggestion, went up to the foothills, and accomplished his mission.

Geller and I learned different lessons from our digs in Hiddenite. He learned that digging a hole is hard work and requires some on-the-fly engineering, since the size of a shovel doesn’t allow you to just dig straight down. He also learned that hole-digging is satisfying, which I did not find it to be. It’s been at least 15 years since my trip to the Emerald Hollow Mine. I can’t remember if I’d brought my then-girlfriend or my parents up there. Or both. I remember I’d billed it as a fun activity. I can’t say that anyone who got dirty and dusty and sweaty and found nothing at all felt that it was fun. Mostly, it was manual labor. I guess I was just too far ahead of my time.

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I did learn that there are far easier ways to find pretty rocks at the Emerald Hollow Mine. For example, you can just pay for a bucket of dirt that comes pre-seeded with colorful stones, and just use the sluice to wash way the soil until they show up in your pan. That’s the far easier option for the hordes of kids who show up in Hiddenite on field trips. I also should have realized that digging for actual emeralds on a hillside where many, many other people have been digging for decades was going to come up empty. One man’s current hole is another man’s former hole, it seems.

That said, there are legitimate emeralds in Hiddenite, mostly at legitimate emerald mines. They were first discovered by a kid in 1879 who was using what he thought were just greenish-colored rocks to shoot birds with his slingshot. That brought in a prospector named William Hidden a few years later. He wound up finding an emerald that was 8.5 inches long and weighed 9 ounces. The new type of emerald (which is found nowhere else in the world and is now North Carolina’s official state precious stone), along with the nearby town, were both named Hiddenite.

Hidden’s mine eventually shut down, but there have been emerald mines of varying sizes in that area ever since. One guy, a farmer and miner named W. Renn Adams, ended up finding a 310-carat chunk of hiddenite in 2009 and had it cut it into an 64-carat emerald called the “Carolina Emperor.” It was the largest cut emerald ever found in North America, and some of the smaller chunks were cut into gemstones that sold for $10,000 to $15,000 each. The bigger emerald was bought up by an anonymous bidder, and is now part of a collection at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It, along with three other uncut emeralds from Adams’s farm, were once valued at $5 million.

There are a lot of interesting things in the ground in North Carolina. Workers keep digging up fossils and megalodon teeth at a huge phosphate mine out east in Aurora. Mt. Airy has granite. People once found gold under modern-day Charlotte. All sorts of interesting minerals come from Spruce Pine, including the “sand” in the bunkers at Augusta National, the home of The Masters golf tournament. And it turns out that really big pre-dug holes can become tourist attractions, like The Quarry at Grant Park in Winston-Salem. You can also find very mysterious holes in the woods, provided you’re 1.) really into aliens or 2.) really high.

Hiddenite has mines. It has holes. And it still has emeralds down there, somewhere. If you go dig for them at the Emerald Hollow Mine, you’ll probably come up empty. But if you go there to dig for yourself, you may come away feeling something else. “The hole isn’t a means to an escape.” Geller says in his video. “It, itself, is the escape.”

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Most infrastructure is held together by five commands someone remembers when shit breaks. Docs are out of date, if they exist. The real answers? Buried in Slack threads, rotting in Notion, or trapped in someone's shell history.

Atuin CLI fixed part of this, with synced, searchable shell history. But teams need more than history. They need workflows that don't live in someone's head (or their shell).

Set up. SSH in. Export some variables. Run some commands. Hope nothing breaks. Stuff we do every day, but still have to piece together from fragments of the past, or copy paste from some document somewhere.

That's why we built the next step.

A local-first, executable runbook editor for real terminal workflows

Built to make workflows repeatable, shareable, and reliable.

Runbooks should run. Workflows shouldn't live in someone's head. Docs shouldn't rot the moment you write them.

Atuin Desktop looks like a doc, but runs like your terminal. Script blocks, embedded terminals, database clients and prometheus charts - all in one place.

• Kill context switching: chain shell commands, database queries and HTTP requests
• Docs that don't rot: execute directly + stay relevant
• Reusable automation: dynamic runbooks with Jinja-style templating
• Instant recall: autocomplete from your real shell history
• Local-first, CRDT-powered: if it runs in your terminal, it runs in a runbook
• Sync and share with Atuin Hub: up to date, across devices and teams

How we use it today

We’re already running real-world workflows in Atuin Desktop:

• Releasing Atuin CLI (no more checklist hell)
• Migrating infra safely between environments
• Spinning up staging or prod with confidence
• Managing and collaborating on live database queries

This is how we ship, manage infra, and collaborate.

What’s next

• Team accounts: true collaborative ops
• Generate runbooks from your shell history. Workflows that write themselves

Get early access

We're rolling out Atuin Desktop now. If you're done copy-pasting from Notion and Slack, or spelunking through shell history, join the early access list!

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In the late 1600s, self-made scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek embarked on a project that would make him question the very nature of life and its limit. And would send ripples of philosophical and scientific quandaries through the generations that persist today. Peering through the hand-ground lenses he crafted, magnifying his subjects 275 times, the Dutch cloth merchant and naturalist was the first human to glimpse an otherworldly microcosmos where astonishing creatures seemed to defy the laws of nature and survival. He called them, adoringly, “animalcules.” 

In 1687, he discovered some animalcules so peculiar in form and function that he would spend decades observing them. We now know these tiny animals, which had wheel-like appendages that van Leeuwenhoek correctly surmised were for feeding, as rotifers. They live in watery environments throughout the globe, from the tropics to Antarctica, in oceans, temporary puddles, and even in moisture within moss. But van Leeuwenhoek wasn’t satisfied just watching them. He decided to test these ubiquitous animals’ limits. He wanted to see what would happen to them when their surrounding aqueous environment dried up.

Other animalcules, he noted, would readily break apart or collapse in on themselves upon desiccation. But when he dried out rotifers, they each instead contracted into a shrunken, wrinkled oval, now called a “tun” or “xerosome.”

Philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being.

What van Leeuwenhoek discovered next went beyond anything he could have imagined: After adding water to a glass tube that contained dried sediment and rotifer tuns he’d collected from a rain gutter, van Leeuwenhoek watched in wonder through his homemade microscope as rotifers came back to life. “I examined it, and perceived some of the Animalcules lying closely heaped together,” he wrote in a letter to the British Royal Society. “In a short time afterwards they began to extend their bodies, and in half an hour at least a hundred of them were swimming about the glass …” As a good experimentalist, he repeated the process by drying out other rotifers and witnessing the same phenomenon numerous times—even after samples were desiccated for a month.

“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation. 

According to University of California, Davis philosophy professor Cody Gilmore, van Leeuwenhoek’s observations presented a philosophical paradox beyond the biological questions they raised concerning desiccation and survival. Consider those newly identified rotifers in van Leeuwenhoek’s dried gutter sediment that apparently came back to life. The tuns, as far as the progenitor of microbiology could tell, showed no signs of living—no movement or activity or perceptible change for days, potentially weeks. Were the animals technically dead? Were they, in tun form, actually still alive but dormant, like a mammal in hibernation? Or were they in some kind of liminal, in-between state? An underlying assumption held by most people, including biologists and philosophers today, is that organisms are either alive or dead. Gilmore notes that the paradox lies in maintaining the possibility of such a binary proposition in the face of rotifers and other extremophiles that seem to occupy such a third state as they await reanimation.

Van Leeuwenhoek wrote that his rotifers “came back to life,” but he never hinted at whether he thought they were resurrected or if they had remained alive, apparently failing to fully realize—or being unwilling to confront—the philosophical quandary raised by his discovery. Despite acceptance from the Royal Society, his observations also failed to gain notice by his contemporaries and were shelved for years. Without a powerful enough “van Leeuwenhoek microscope” or accurate scales to precisely measure desiccation, naturalists of the day could neither replicate his observations nor dive into their implications. In fact, many of van Leeuwenhoek’s early observations were often met with skepticism. Forget about tiny, resurrecting bugs. A microcosmos of bizarre lifeforms, unseeable with the naked eye, sounded to most of his contemporaries more like fiction than reality.

Even as microbiologists have been working for centuries now to piece together how rotifers and several other animal species survive desiccation and other extreme conditions, philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being in which organisms can exist.

Since van Leeuwenhoek’s seminal observations, subsequent biologists have found other microscopic beings that could similarly survive desiccation. One of these is the microscopic “eelworm” (now known as the larval stage of the pathogenic roundworm, Anguillulina tritici), which live in diseased grain. They can be dehydrated to the point where they crumble into powder. But, when left intact, these thoroughly dried animals can revive and squirm around upon rehydration.

After confirming this mysterious eelworm resurrection and observing rotifers reanimate, British naturalist Henry Baker alighted upon their seemingly supernatural quality, writing, in his 1764 guide, Employment for the Microscope, “What Life really is, seems as much too subtle for our Understanding to conceive or define, as for our senses to discern and examine.” 

In the 1770s, Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani burrowed even deeper into the philosophical ramifications of this physiological phenomenon, which by then scientists had learned also included tardigrades, microscopic “water bears” (tiny animals that researchers have since discovered can survive not only desiccation but also radiation, extreme temperatures, and even the vacuum of outer space). Spallanzani wrote, in his “Observations and Experiments Upon Some Singular Animals which may be Killed and Revived,” “an animal, which revives after death, and which within certain limits, revives as often as we please, is a phenomenon, as incredible as it seems improbable and paradoxical. It confounds the most accepted ideas of animality; it creates new ideas, and becomes an object no less interesting to the researches of the naturalist than to the speculation of the profound metaphysician.”

Although they weren’t expressed outright, the tricky, big questions were now apparent. In their dormant state, were creatures such as rotifers, some worm larvae, and tardigrades alive or dead? When reanimated, were they resurrected from death? At the time, fear of excommunication or condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for publishing scientific observations that challenged Church doctrine impacted communication about new scientific findings.

But science marched on. In the 19th century, the French zoologist Louis Doyère, who was among the first to study tardigrades, developed and improved desiccation methods by bringing precise temperature measurements and vacuum chambers that eliminated moisture into the experimental mix. Still, leading naturalists remained skeptical as to whether rotifers, eelworms, and tardigrades were fully desiccated and whether or not they ceased physiological activities entirely. At that time metabolism was only an emerging concept, so life was defined more by visible criteria like reproduction, self-initiated movement, and growth. 

About 10 percent of rotifers’ genome isn’t even animal.

With a few exceptions, further investigation into the life-and-death question raised by van Leeuwenhoek’s rotifers stagnated like a tun for about the next century. It wasn’t until the mid 20th century that David Keilin, a Russian-born, British biologist, set the stage for contemporary research into extremophiles by articulating the need for scientifically understanding their ability to survive desiccation.

Keilin himself suffered from asthma and was intrigued by the mechanisms that enable respiration. His greatest scientific contribution was his discovery of cytochromes, enzymes crucial for cellular respiration. He was fascinated by animals with the ability to suspend respiratory processes. In 1959 he wrote, in painstaking detail, the entire scientific history of rotifer desiccation survival, from van Leeuwenhoek’s initial experiments with gutter sediment onward. Although the paper did not include new data or observations, Keilin revolutionized understanding of the enigmatic process in this single work. Rather than viewing desiccation survival as a philosophical curiosity, he showed that, death or life aside, it’s an extreme form of physiological dormancy worth studying on a basic, biological level. 

He defined rotifers’ dehydrated form as “cryptobiosis”—“A state in which no visible signs of life are present, and metabolic activity is either temporarily absent or so reduced as to be undetectable.” By using the term “undetectable,” he transcended previous nitpicking over whether the creatures had completely dried out or had suspended life’s activities. Instead he turned the spotlight toward describing the specific mechanisms that allowed such organisms to survive a state of unmeasurable activity.

In essence, Keilin set the stage for revealing the “how” of it all. It was a challenge motivated partially by space exploration, because scientists were beginning to consider that desiccated extremophiles might possibly exist on other planets. In the 1970s, researchers discovered accumulations of a sugar molecule called trehalose in other desiccation-tolerant animals, such as brine shrimp and nematodes. These organisms could replace water molecules in cells with this compound and prevent their membrane from breaking or collapsing upon desiccation. Trehalose forms a glass-like matrix that fortifies cellular structure, maintaining it during dehydration. Upon the return of water, the sugar molecules simply dissolve and cellular activity returns.

But there was a wrinkle: Rotifers didn’t seem to use the trehalose trick. Researchers working in the mid-2000s discovered that instead of relying on sugars to form a protective matrix in their cells, these animals produce proteins to replace the water in their cells. The molecules, known as late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins, were originally discovered in plants, which use them to protect seeds from drying out. Essentially, LEA proteins create stability in cell membranes which might otherwise break down during desiccation. The proteins, which are scattered throughout the membranes of rotifer cells, act as a shield. As the cells dry out and their contents physically shrink and fold over, LEA proteins assure that the membranes don’t break. When water returns, everything expands and unfolds back into its original form. 

This doesn’t mean that rehydrated rotifers rejoin the living unscathed. During desiccation they undergo considerable chromosomal breakage. Some regions of their DNA are shattered. But when water returns, potentially after years, the organisms are still able to begin moving again within about five to 10 minutes. Within about half an hour, they will have restructured their DNA as it was. To achieve their apparent resurrection, rotifers rely heavily on advanced DNA repair mechanisms. 

The process of desiccation and repair keeps their DNA in a relatively fragile, yet flexible state. Such resilience in turn sets the stage for a number of mysterious genetic anomalies that are likely connected to their extremophilic capabilities. 

The simple dichotomy of alive or dead doesn’t make sense.

Rotifers are known as “evolutionary scandals.” About 10 percent of their genome isn’t even animal. They appear to have taken on DNA from yeast, fungi, and plants and incorporated it as their own. Genetically, their ability to survive desiccation derives largely from these other organisms. Researchers have identified the non-animal genes rotifers have co-opted as the very genes that enable desiccation survival.

Their advanced DNA repair mechanisms and their ability to incorporate foreign DNA are both extraordinary and seem unlikely to be coincidental. But which came first? Diego Fontaneto, a biologist at the Water Research Institute in Verbania, Italy, explains that rotifers could have originally adopted foreign DNA through the process of desiccation and recovery. “If this is true, how could they use the bacterial DNA for surviving desiccation?” he asks. “It becomes an issue of what came first—the chicken or the egg.”

One thing we do know however, is that when the rotifers are dried out, their physiological activity indeed comes to a halt. There is no detectable trace of life in a tun, whatsoever. Fontaneto offers two literary analogies to which researchers have turned to over the years to try to understand rotifers’ strange feats. Are they more like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose portrait ages while he appears to remain young, only to have his true, older form revealed upon the destruction of the painting? That is, do rotifers age while they are dehydrated, revealing a degraded form upon reanimating? Or are they more like “sleeping beauties” whose aging pauses during stasis?

It might be neither. Upon rehydration, rotifers can actually appear even younger than they were before they entered stasis, Fontaneto explains. Reanimated rotifers tend to live longer while active and to produce more offspring than rotifers that have not desiccated, despite having lived the same amount of time in water. “It seems they really need to desiccate,” Fontaneto suggests. “For them it’s not a stress. It’s so beneficial, they really can’t live without desiccation.”

Although biologists now understand some of the mechanics underlying rotifer desiccation and survival, the philosophical debate over whether or not they die remains unsettled. Despite Keilin’s clever workaround that motivated researchers to stick to the science of their survival, we appear to be back where we started. 

For Gilmore, the presence of metabolic activity is not completely synonymous with life. “So there’s a pretty strong case that there’s no metabolism” in a tun, he says. “Then the question is still not answered as to the status of the organism. Is it alive? Is it dead? The answer to the question about metabolism doesn’t provide a direct answer about biological status.” 

According to Gilmore, even though there’s a solid argument rotifer tuns show no detectable sign of living—metabolism, respiration, digestion, etc.—there’s an equally strong argument that they are not dead because as soon as water returns, they become active. There must, he suggests, instead be fault in the model that all things are either alive or dead. He calls this “exhaustivism,” simply because it exhausts other possibilities. 

Gilmore explains that the simple dichotomy of alive or dead doesn’t make sense. “It’s just that to be dead is partly a historical property and it requires having died and having died requires having been alive—or at least cryptobiotic,” he says. “So there are lots of things that are not alive and not dead, and they’re not dead because they were never alive—a toothbrush, a rock, a toaster.” Rather, Gilmore and others posit that cryptobiosis is a unique state of being. 

Thomas Lemke, a professor of sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, has a slightly different framework for what state van Leeuwenhoek’s dried rotifers were in. Lemke suggests moving past the term cryptobiosis because, in strict Greek translation, it implies the existence of some hidden, or latent form of life. Rotifers and other animals that enter cryptobiosis don’t have any kind of hidden capacity, he argues. 

Lemke prefers the concept of suspended life, what he terms “limbiosis,” derived from the Latin limbus, meaning edge or border. It offers connections to other elements. He explains that if you are suspended, you are suspended between other things. A suspension bridge for example suspends one between shores. Such a state might hinge on, “What is going on not what might go on in the future—the potential,” he says. 

Rotifers will continue to make the case for a fully fledged third state of being, even if it maintains a connection between the two main states of alive and dead. Van Leeuwenhoek’s original observations of their strange microscopic world sounded like fantasy to other naturalists at the time, influencing his staunch empirical approach to science and his advocacy of visible evidence for phenomena over philosophical reasoning. What surprise he might have had if he found out that his strange observations of reviving animacules had laid the groundwork for a philosophical debate enduring centuries.

The post The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death appeared first on Nautilus.

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