From Air&Space
Thirty-five new occupants arrived at the International Space Station in late October. Three were astronauts, the rest were fish.
“This is the first experiment in the world to take care of animals for such a long time in the space station — for two months,” says Akira Kudo of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “Normally, animals are cared for for just two weeks. Only astronauts stay longer than that.”
Kudo is the principal investigator for a study called Medaka Osteoclast, or MOST, examining how the bones of the medaka fish — also known as Japanese killifish, which are popular both as pets and research animals — will respond to microgravity. (Medaka fish were the first vertebrates to mate in space; four of them successfully laid and hatched eggs in an experiment aboard Columbia in 1994.)
The fish are living in a specially designed space aquarium called the Aquatic Habitat, partitioned into two, 1.5-pint sections. Housed in the Japanese Kibo module, the habitat has temperature control, water circulation and bacterial filtration systems, and…
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