Chicken In Space Game
Nadia Grubb
About a week after the eggs returned to Earth, eight of the eggs hatched. Only those fertilized nine days before launch and farther along in their development made it. The first of the chicks to hatch was named Kentucky (this was a marketing opportunity for KFC after all) and sent to live at the Louisville Zoo. The rest of the chicks were studied throughout their lives and compared with a control group incubated entirely on Earth. Other than their unusual in-ovo orbits around the Earth, Chix in Space were basically normal chickens.
It\u2019s been a big week for people who like space. On Thursday, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars where it will remain for one full Martian year\u2014687 Earth days. The ultimate goal is that the rover will help scientists determine whether Mars has ever been a living planet and, at least where people like Elon Musk are concerned, whether humans could make Mars a home away from home.
Of course if the movie The Martian taught us anything it\u2019s that people living on another planet are going to need a way to feed themselves. (Preferably with more than potatoes.) The International Space Station already has a small space garden where astronauts have been practicing how to grow leafy greens and colorful zinnia flowers in zero gravity. But trying to grow enough food to feed people on the surface of Mars will have a host of additional challenges. Consider that the planet gets half the sunlight that Earth does, has higher levels of radiation, and water and soil alike will have to be processed or amended to give Earth plants the proper nutrient levels to grow. It\u2019s complicated enough to grow vegetables. Yet many researchers, past and present, who have thought about what kind of diets humans might have on Mars, include chicken and/or quail on the menu. Even Biosphere 2 where humans lived inside a totally enclosed three-acre complex of geodesic domes had animal cages which included jungle fowl, the chicken\u2019s living ancestor. People really do not want to give up on the idea of a space diet that includes meat (or at least eggs).
In 2012 some people posted a three-minute video on Youtube that purports to show \u201Creal uncut footage\u201D of a chicken on Mars. (It is not real footage.) The video has been watched over three million times. Let\u2019s be clear, there are no Martian chickens wandering around for a NASA rover to discover but there is a history of research hoping to someday find a way to get chickens\u2014or at least quail\u2014into space as a food source for long-term missions.
A lot of animals were sent into space before birds got their turn. In 1979\u2014after animals from fruit flies to dogs to monkeys were sent into space often with tragic results for the animals\u2014Russian cosmonauts began trying to hatch quail eggs in space. None of these chicks hatched because of slow development and deformities\u2014possibly a result of higher than usual radiation, according to an article in Audubon. Quail are small game fowl that can be used for both eggs and meat and thus, potentially more useful in space where, well, space and resources are hard to come by.
While this was happening, John Vellinger, an eighth grader in Lafayette, Indiana began hatching a proposal to send chicken eggs into space. It wasn\u2019t until his freshman year of college that he was finally paired with a KFC scientist (and $50,000 of KFC funding for the project) to develop a chicken egg incubator that could be sent into space. Unfortunately the first experiment was sent up on the Challenger which famously and shockingly exploded a minute into its flight, killing all seven crew members.
NASA and Vellinger tried the experiment again three years later on the Discovery\u2019s 1989 flight STS-29. This incubator which had grown more advanced since the first model, could hold 32 eggs: half were fertilized two days before launch and the other half nine days before launch \u201Cto study if any changes in the developing embryo could be attributed to weightlessness,\u201D writes a Collect Space article on the project which was dubbed Chix in Space. The eggs orbited the earth 80 times and travelled over two million miles during their five-day mission. \u201CWe should have some baby space chicks by Easter,\\\" a \u201Csomewhat frazzled-looking\u201D Vellinger told The Washington Post.
The following year another quail experiment resulted in the first hatch of a live bird in space. Eight of them to be exact. A blog on the history of the \u201Ccosmoquail\u201D notes that the birds were \u201Cthe first vertebrates to be born or rather hatched into the weightlessness of space.\u201D Sadly but unsurprisingly the chicks couldn\u2019t get used to microgravity and were unable to feed themselves. They all died or were euthanized. In 1990, the next quail in space were given little jackets that allowed them to feed. They lived but didn\u2019t thrive. The cosmoquail blog notes that upon return to Earth the quail were weak and had trouble with balance as well as a posture that made them look \u201Cdefeated\u201D by gravity.
By the millennium, it seemed that the obsession with getting birds into space had cooled somewhat. The fact that many birds rely on gravity to drink (they scoop water into their beaks then tilt their heads back), the high rates of poor incubation and mortality, and their general unhappiness with zero gravity life sure makes it seem like they\u2019d be poor companions on this particular journey.
Only one bird\u2014a quail\u2014has ever laid an egg in space. The birds that have hatched in space and stayed alive apparently did not feel like mating in zero gravity. It\u2019s not a great sign for aspiring Martian poultry farmers.
As I wrote in a previous newsletter about the long history of chickens on sea voyages, humans have been bringing chickens with us to new frontiers throughout our history together. Birds might be able to fly but space, it seems, is one place that poultry just doesn\u2019t belong.
The girls and I \u201Cenjoyed\u201D our snowstorm a few weekends ago. A few of them had never seen snow before and were very suspicious of this new cold white stuff covering the ground and also falling from the sky. I got them to come out with the help of some mealworms but for the most part the flock turned around and went back inside once those were eaten up. I had to give the coop some extra insulation since we don\u2019t usually have 25 degree nights with high winds and ice but the nest box seemed warm in the mornings when I let them out and there wasn\u2019t one speck of frostbite on them.
They have a little cozy coop heater that lives in the nest area during winter. It\u2019s a panel that lets off a little radiant heat and mostly affects a chicken standing right next to it. I highly recommend it since it\u2019s not a fire risk (though you should always check the wires every season to make sure they\u2019re intact) and some of the bantams especially love snuggling up next to it on chilly nights.
But the snowstorms in the Pacific Northwest where I live and throughout the country led to a lot of posts in chicken groups about baby chick orders being stranded in post offices for long periods of time and high losses of mail order chicks. Between that and a newly proposed bill in NY that would end shipping chicks by mail, I thought it was time to write about the people for and against chick shipping. Here\u2019s a link to the resulting article published by Modern Farmer.
A total of 32 fertilized eggs from broiler hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) were launched into space for a five-day tour of weightlessness. They were divided into two groups: younger embryos, having first undergone two days of terrestrial incubation, followed by the five-day exposure to microgravity and a set of more mature embryos, having first undergone nine days of incubation on Earth, followed by the five days in the onboard incubator. Half in number of each group were allowed a full term (approximately 21 days) of incubation upon return to Earth, while the other half were dissected upon landing for histological, morphological, and in the case of mineralized tissues, elemental analysis.
Of those incubated for the full term, in the young embryo group, not a single egg hatched, while all of the eight more mature eggs, subjected to the nine-day pre-incubation on Earth, hatched and proved to be viable.R.L. Hullinger Dissection revealed that in the younger embryos, development ceased at varied stages during exposure to microgravity conditions aboard Discovery STS-29.
Preliminary analysis of the viable, more mature embryos indicated that microgravity conditions did not significantly affect development. The mineral content and histo-morphoplogy of long bones of the sacrificed mature embryos did not differ from that of the bones sampled from embryos of the synchronous control group incubated on Earth, suggesting that bone modelling and osteoblastic activity in ovo were not affected by microgravity.M.F. Holick et al. Eggshell mineralization studies revealed that in those younger embryos that failed to hatch, the shell was substantially thicker and contained more magnesium, while the eggshell sampled from the more mature embryos that hatched did not differ from the that of the control set.P.Y. Hester et al. Morphology of otoconia from sacrificed embryos subjected to weightlessness, examined by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), did not exhibit any deformity or systematic size difference compared to otoconia of embryos subjected to Earthly incubation. R.V. Kenyon et al. Generally, microgravity had adverse effects only on the younger embryos, while the more mature embryos of chickens seemed not to be vulnerable. This result implicated a possible threshold after which the gravity field factor becomes irrelevant to the microenvironment of embryogenesis.
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