Mammals in space

[BookStop]

Does anyone know if mammals have ever been born in space?

A friend and I were having an extremely nerdy discussion on what the effects of a no-gravity gestational period, followed by birth and actually growing up in a n environment like that.

Has it been done, perhaps with mice???

My friend thinks if humans were born and then lived in space, they would perhaps evolve to look similar to what we earthbound humans think of as traditional aliens. You know, with elongated limbs, large eyes, and flat faces.

I, on the other hand, wonder if gravity plays no part on our structure, wouldn't our bones form poorly, perhaps curving? Obviously, our innards would rearrange themselves in a free floating environment, and perhhaps we coldn't even survive without gravity constantly pulling down on our orgnas. Heart might get crowded out during developemnt and we couldn't live.Assuming we did live though, what would we look like? Jabba the Hut, maybe?.

Feet would cease to be important, and might just be floppy annoying ends to our other somewhat useless legs.

If we did somehow evolve in space, we would never be able to return to earth. Unless we solved the gravity problem that is.

 

[Sephiroth]

This is an interesting question.


There hasn't been a whole lot of reasearch done on this, but it has been done, yes...not with mice, but with rats.

Several pregnant female rats were sent into orbit, spending 11 days on the space shuttle Atlantis.


Most of the pups survived, I think, but they discovered that the ones which had experienced zero gravity could not tell 'up' from 'down' (they dropped them into a tank of water - the control specimens righted themselves and started to 'swim', but the 'space rats' sank upside-down to the bottom of the tank and had to be rescued).

Going by these preliminary results it would seem that gravity is fundamental to our development. Not surprising, when you think about it.

Although in many other ways the pups did develop 'normally'.




The paper is available here. I haven't read it yet (I just looked for it there), but I read a report about it a while back.

The summary is as follows:

Our results, when viewed in the context of other studies, lead to the following conclusions. Prenatal space flight, per se, neither precludes, hastens nor delays attainment of end points that result from mechanisms which control postnatal weight gain, eyelid opening, and walking. Where significant differences between groups did occur in postnatal measures we took, they were generally between the flight and vivarium B control groups. Such differences are better attributed to a variable(s) not peculiar to space flight, for example stress. Second, return to Earth after space flight is accompanied--in the short term and for the adult, in this case the pregnant rat--by clearly decreased movement. Finally, although in most cases parturition is normal, space flight for the pregnant rat is more likely to coincide with perinatal death of its progeny. This, too, may be stress related.