Space Fish: ISS Aquatic Habitat Delivered By HTV-3

astroengine writes "Yes, it's the moment we've all (secretly) been waiting for: Fish In Space! But before you go getting too excited and start asking the big questions — like: if there's a bubble in a microgravity aquarium, what happens if the fish falls into it? Let's ponder that for a minute... — it's worth pointing out that the fish aren't actually in space right now (their habitat has just been delivered to the space station by the unmanned Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle 'Kounotori 3') and this fishy experiment isn't just to see how fish enjoy swimming upside down, there's some serious science behind it."

Comments

Re:Looking forward to this one.

[Truth is life]

Not that new...this experiment is derived from one flown on the Shuttle a few times already. This is mostly an extension of the previous research. What I am really interested in is the egg-to-egg possibility--the system is designed to support up to three generations of fish, so they will be able to observe whether zero-gravity causes intergenerational changes (eg., whether the children of those born in zero-g are as fit as those born of one-g fish, or as one-g fish themselves). This is a significant challenge for any possibility of space colonization, so experimentation in it is quite welcome.

Re:Looking forward to this one.

[Trepidity]

this experiment is derived from one flown on the Shuttle a few times already

In particular, goldfish and newts flew on STS-65 (1994). Not sure if complete life-cycle experiments have been done before. Some quick searching turns up this speculation (Google Books preview) as of 2003 that fish will soon become the first vertebrate to live a complete life cycle in space.