Can tardigrades survive being eaten? Compared to a tardigrade, the cockroach seems fragile. But can tardigrades survive the acidic environment of being eaten by most animals?

In there natural state no, tartigrade have absolutely no way to survive the acidic content of stomachs and are fragile.

In their cryptobiosed form (extremely resilient form) there has been no research to determine if they could survive extremely acid environnements. The things that we know they can survive is:

* Temperature
* Pressure
* Dehydration
* Radiation
* The outer space environnement
* Toxins



However, very few organisms possess mechanisms to tolerate highly acid environnement since acid affect cell membranes by "attacking" mainly the proteins and lipids. These organisms have evolved these traits because they live in acidic environnements, tartigrades on the other side don't.

Another point to add is, entering cryptobiosed form takes time, if the tartigrade would be eaten in it's natural form, it wouldn't have the time to cryptobiose and thus it would die.

Tartigrades

I hope this gives you some useful information