sex in space
Sunday September 19, 2004; part of: Science without worms and Trouty things

The FWB has circumvented a pet ban by buying an aquarium, and is now researching which fish she should stock it with.

Google led her to the Japanese ricefish, or Medaka, the only species of vertebrate attested to have had sex in space.

It wasn't easy for the Medaka. It took them hours. Many candidates reacted to the strains of zero gravity by looping the loop compulsively. But in the end, four heroic ricefish were sent up on Columbia in 1994, and several hundred of them came down.

I find it shocking that these creatures beat my beloved worm into space. But they have one more thing in common with c.elegans: there are lab stocks marked in interesting ways with GFP. All we have to do now is to get hold of some.

Posted by andrewb at September 19, 2004 01:35 PM
Comments

If you ejaculate in a weightless environment, don't you risk blasting yourself backwards? I'll bet you'd be just as cautious as those medaka if you had to do it up there.

MH

Posted by: Hewitt on September 20, 2004 08:34 AM

Ah, the mighty Hewitt bollocks.

Lesser beings are unlikely to notice the reaction that you fear. It is a matter of comparative mass.

Posted by: acb on September 20, 2004 03:08 PM

May I recommend a sober, thoughtful and -- in my view -- conclusive study of a related tricky subject, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"? (Gratuitous trout reference: included)

Curiously - or not - the subject of sex in space was a staple of New Wave SF, itself a product of scientific and cultural mutations cross-breeding in the 1960s and 70s. I can remember discourses on the Nasa Sutra, The First Wank In Space, seminal trajectories, and spaceships powered by orgone and thus only able to enter hyperspace when the crew simultaneously orgasmed (Star Trek would have been oh so much better) - and that's before naughty people like Michael Moorcock (even the name...) really went to town on zero-G gonad fun.

It is, however, irresistably cool to have a collection of the first animals known to have copulated in orbit and I salute the FWB.

R

Posted by: Rupert on September 20, 2004 03:42 PM

>>Lesser beings are unlikely to notice the reaction that you fear. It is a matter of comparative mass.<<

It is a matter of Newton's Third Law of Motion. (And frequency of ejaculation, too, I suppose.)

MH

Posted by: Hewitt on September 20, 2004 04:52 PM

Hundred of thousands of flat-dwellers with anti-pet landlords can't be wrong. What is FWB? Fort Walton Beach? Ech. I hate TLAs!

Posted by: Brian McKinlay on September 24, 2004 02:59 AM

FW - sorry - the Future Wolf Biologist, my fourteen-year-old daughter.

Posted by: el Patron on September 25, 2004 09:56 AM

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