Tardigrades belong to the more than 1,100 species of free-living tiny invertebrates living in habitats ranging from moss to sand to fresh water to oceans. I was surprised to find out that humans have known about creatures like little Eon for more than a couple of centuries. German naturalist Johann August Ephraim Goeze first described them in 1773!
I’m willing to bet there are not too many people who can claim to have met one but author-illustrator Cybèle Young has. The experience led to her creating a picture book that combines a child’s imaginings with the science of this peculiar little creature whose other names, endearingly, are “moss piglet” and “water bear.”
When life isn’t good—when it’s too cold or dry, for instance—a tardigrade can do something astonishing. It can go into a state of suspended animation and turn into a little speck of matter called a tun. Just that word, so small and easy to toss out, makes me smile. Tuns can stay still and specky and inert for years, even decades.
Photo courtesy of Cybèle Young
Cybèle’s book, a fictional first person narrative of a child encountering a tardigrade, is illustrated with her own graphite pencil drawings as well as Japanese paper sculptures. Additional art was contributed by Nell Jocelyn. The effect brings a delicate microscopic world to life, so that the little tardigrade plods along among “other teeny beings who wiggled and jumped.” The girl’s affection for her remarkable pet also finds visual expression in a profusion of folded hearts that float across the spread, and in the tiny imaginary world of amusement and leisure that she seeks to create for the little creature. A startling moment precedes one of discovery, before a resplendent foldout page reveals the possibilities inherent in caring for a living being you can’t quite understand.
On the surface this appears to be a simple child-centred story with an unusual animal character, but look again, because it’s worth another look. The pairing of text and images is undergirded by astonishing information about a part of the natural world of which most of us remain completely unaware.
There are also bigger questions implicit in the book. The youngest readers may not see them, but they could well emerge for readers who return to the book repeatedly over a year or two—the kind of recursive reading that makes readers out of picture book listeners. They are questions of pets and ownership, stewardship, responsibility for the natural world.... there is so much here to unpack.
My granddaughter, now 5, loves to be read to. It’s been fascinating watching her interact with this book. She has questions about almost every page. Why are there hearts there? Where did Eon go before he came back? Why did she try to build him all those things?
Sharper-eyed than me by exponential degrees, she’s able to spot Eon hiding in every microscope slide, as a speck in the girl’s palm, in his dried-up tun version, and even on the very most-est peak of an icy mountain. She’s a little confused by all the names of the tardigarde and thinks the pictures on that page are of different creatures called “moss bear” and so on, but the visual parallel of the baby and the tardigrade in the author notes isn’t lost on her. I’ve read this book to her, over video-calls, over the distance between us, perusing endpapers and author notes, all of this many times over. The crowning event one evening was when she ducked behind a chair at the end, deferring bedtime gleefully by announcing, “I’m going to hide like a tardigrade.”
No one is more wildly imaginative than a young child and no form is harder to craft in a way that speaks to that wild imagination. Teachers might feel drawn to Eon on account of the lessons the book packs—and there are many—but the gift here is how Eon: My Pet Tardigrade taps the sensibility of childhood.
