Super Science High School （SSH） is the system MEXT specifies for high schools that focus their education on science and math, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency supports them （As of FY2006, 99 schools have been specified）. In the meeting held in Tokyo in August 2005, where students gave presentations about the results of their studies, 26 schools, mainly the students from the schools specified in FY2003, gave presentations.

 Four schools were selected in the section meetings held on the first day and gave presentations in the plenary session. Among them, the one that won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Incentive Award 2005 was the "research on tardigrade" by Mr. Shushi Abukawa and Ms. Yoshie Shibata in the third year of Akita Odate Homei High School. They wrote about the results of their study on tardigrades, which are microorganisms about 1 mm long that occur in soil and water all over the world, and which are capable of anhydrobiosis （the ability to survive under extreme desiccation and high temperature by reversibly suspending their metabolism and going into a state of cryptobiosis）.

 Two years before the time, Mr. Abukawa hit on the idea of tardigrades capable of anhydrobiosis from a magazine column as a research theme of SSH. He started the research by observing microorganisms of school soil and street gutters via an optical microscope. In the beginning, he could not find tardigrades for a while, but after assembling a device to pick out microorganisms from soil in the second month, he became able to observe them at last. Next, without any specialists around him to whom he could ask questions, depending on documents and the Internet and reading even English information, he made efforts to classify tardigrades of which about 120 species are said to exist in Japan. Thus, group research of one year finished. In the second year, he resumed the research privately and Ms Shibata joined. There was a time when they could not classify them as they wished and were distressed, but they happened to learn of the existence of a systematic key to tardigrades when they attended a domestic preliminary contest for International Biology Olympics, and by using it as a stepping stone, could drastically improve the precision of classification.

 Due to the lack of time, they could not fully analyze tardigrades' ability of anhydrobiosis. However, through biological research and classification of tardigrades, they could deepen their understanding of biology and the system of evolution. The dream of both of them is "to be a biologist."

 They learned essential attitudes for research by starting observation without any idea on how to do it, groping for the method for themselves, and found satisfaction in performing research.