Tardigrade gummy bear molds

thingiverse

Positive molds for making tardigrade/waterbear gummies are being created. They must be set with a permanent mold like silicone or vacuum-formed to get the negative waterbear space needed to pour candy. Currently, experimenting with printing a negative mold directly is underway. One .STL has walls for pouring silicone molds, while the other is only the positive forms for pressed molds. Each mold contains 30 tardigrades, hopefully leading to an improvement in throughput compared to a previous version with 10 tardigrades/mold (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1096026). Real-life images are from a print of the earlier version with 10 tardigrades/mold. A blog post with details from that earlier version is available at http://clairemcwhite.github.io/tardigrades/. Water bears sit somewhere between arthropods and nematodes on the evolutionary tree, and they spend most of their time hanging out on algae clumps and ineffectively swimming with their stubby little legs. While water bears are generally adorable, they are most notorious for their ability to survive complete dehydration, freezing, and the cold vacuum of space. In the break room one day, we realized that water bears resemble living gummy bears. Water bears. Gummy bears. The need to make water bear gummy bears became overwhelming!