“Hope blossoms in the most extreme circumstances.”
In an era of "extreme survival," animals in extreme environments offer a signal of hope.
Professor Choi Jae-cheon strongly recommends the book to influential publications such as The Guardian.
Winner of the British Science Writers' Association Award for Best Article

Meet the animals that survive the harshest environments on Earth, including turtles that don't breathe underwater for six months, frogs that freeze and resurrect in the winter, Saharan silver ants that run one meter per second in the hot desert, microorganisms that survive by eating radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and even tardigrades that traveled into space.


"Extreme Survival" is a record of Alex Riley, a science writer who won the UK's Best Science Writer Award, meeting and exploring life in extreme environments around the world.
[The Guardian], the world-renowned book review magazine [Times Literary Supplement], and many science media outlets have taken note, calling it “excellent.”
Also, Professor Emeritus Choi Jae-cheon of the Department of Ecological Science at Ewha Womans University left a recommendation, saying, “It makes us unable to give up hope that life will continue in Chernobyl and that unknown life forms may exist somewhere in outer space beyond Earth.”

This book is not just a collection of 'amazing animals'; it is a hymn to life that teaches us, who live in an age of extreme survival.
In the natural world, it contains survival strategies that only animals know, and humans can obtain answers that they would never have expected.
Lifeforms that have overcome extreme conditions make us imagine a future where humanity can still live and breathe.
Seeing how life continues to exist even in the face of great disaster and change, we will feel a sense of wonder and hope as one life form, transcending species.

Our life journey is about overcoming extreme environments where there is either no or too much of the elements essential for life, such as water, oxygen, food, cold, pressure, heat, darkness, and radiation.
These extreme environments on Earth are like gateways to distant planets and satellites.
Places once thought to be lifeless now intrigue astrobiologists searching for life beyond Earth.
Furthermore, the way animals adapt to environmental stress provides us with insights needed to treat human diseases and preserve cells and organs.
But when faced with a variety of stressful situations, it is resilience and creativity, the central themes of this book, that enable us to move forward.
--- p.20~21

There is no scientific term to describe the tendency of organisms to gravitate toward extreme environments.
In her 1957 book The Immense Journey, anthropologist and science writer Loren Eisley attempted to explain this tendency as an emotional pull of "the eternal dissatisfaction of life with reality."
He wrote that living things can adapt to even the most unrealistic situations thanks to their "endless tendency to move toward new environments."
Evolution is necessarily adventure-oriented.
Or, as Dr. Ian Malcolm said in the movie Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” --- p.22

I was still amazed at the flexibility of this animal, half its body in its shell and half out.
It is solid but can also shrink.
Like amphibians, they can live both on land and in water.
We breathe in and out air, but we can live almost half a year, or half our life in the long run, without air.
--- p.75

The hopeful thing is that discoveries come from the most unexpected places.
For example, the naked mole rat's resistance to cancer stems from a protein that prevents cells from sticking together.
The protein is produced in large quantities in the skin of these wrinkled mammals, which helps them avoid getting caught or stuck in their labyrinthine burrows.
Leaning back into his desk chair, Parmenter summarizes:
“Ultimately, the skin that grows for underground living leads to resistance to cancer and also helps with longevity.
Who would have expected that?" --- p.103

The frog doesn't have to worry about frostbite.
They build hibernation chambers under piles of fallen leaves near the pool where they were born.
They also pack a lot of glucose into their cells, so that even if water leaks out through the ice crystals that form between the cells, the cells do not burst.
--- p.157

The thin air of high altitudes is a particularly difficult obstacle to overcome.
We can breathe more frequently or increase the volume of our breath, but there is always a moment (just before exhalation) when the air in our lungs is not replenished.
However, birds do not experience shortness of breath like mammals.
Regardless of altitude, birds do not appear to suffer from high-altitude pulmonary edema.
When humans breathe in and out, their lungs expand and contract, but birds breathe by continuously circulating their air in one direction.
--- p.185

Running at full speed during the hottest part of the day reduces competition and the risk of being eaten by predators, but it doesn't last long.
Once you find food, you need to return quickly before your body overheats.
To do this, they memorize landmarks to identify their nests, count their steps, and carefully observe the polarization of light from the sun.
Putting all of this together gives us the coordinates.
Even though desert ants don't know where their next food source will come from, they know very well where they are.
--- p.227

Before the digging equipment was withdrawn, the newly discovered cave was investigated by Romanian speleologist Christian Lascu.
At the time, he had no idea that he was entering a world that had not been touched by human footsteps or any outside influence for over two million years.
(...) Of the 57 species of animals that live in this cave, 37 exist nowhere else on Earth, and they live entirely in a small number of places with oxygen-poor air and sulfur-rich water.
At just 21 meters long, this cave is a tiny speck of dust in the Earth's biosphere, a miniature safari where the 10-centimeter-long civet is the top predator.
--- p.282~284

In fact, mold has been found in even the most radioactive environments long before Chernobyl.
It has long been known that fungi exist in high-radiation environments, from the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site to wastewater samples from other nuclear power plants.
Therefore, Chernobyl, or even Chernobyl itself, was an environment that was sufficiently habitable for these resilient creatures.
--- p.315

Because melanin-rich fungi are good at handling radiation, we need to find ways to utilize them effectively.
In this regard, Casadevall and Dadachova proposed an interesting idea in discussions with NASA engineers.
The idea is to use melanized fungi to protect astronauts from radiation.

Instead of encasing the spacecraft in lead or thick metal, the method involves placing colonies of fungal spores in the hollow spaces inside the spacecraft's outer walls.
This allows the fungi to survive by feeding on the astronauts' feces and growing in a cocoon-like space outside the spacecraft.
These fungi could act as a biological shield in case of radiation attack from outside the spacecraft.
--- p.321

When all hope seems lost, I often turn my gaze back to life itself.
What the animals, plants, and fungi we looked at in the previous chapter taught me is simple.
Life has an amazing ability to recover from any disaster.
Tardigrades will not die out unless the oceans boil and evaporate, and foraminifera still thrive in man-made dead zones.
Even polar bears, often seen as a symbol of impending disaster, are finding ways to adapt and survive by finding new habitats as the ice melts.
--- p.342

One thing is certain.
Once life begins on a planet, it is very difficult for it to completely disappear.
I often imagine Earth millions of years from now.
I wonder if one day the ecosystem will revolve around cooperation and harmony rather than competition and predation, providing a natural counterbalance to the overly destructive actions of humans.

--- p.343