Animals Died in Space but Experiment deemed a success

Russia's Bion-M1 biological research satellite, which recently carried rodents, microorganisms and plants on a month-long space flight, successfully accomplished its mission, an official said on Wednesday, despite the death of most of the animals on board.

"The spacecraft did not show any noticeable failures and has accomplished its program in full," said Vladimir Sychev, deputy director of Russia's Institute of Medical and Biological Studies.

Russia launched the Bion-1M satellite, its first biological research satellite since 2007, on a 30-day mission on April 19 to conduct biology, physiology and biotechnology research in orbit.

The aim of the study was to help pave the way for future interplanetary flights including Mars missions, according to the Federal Space Agency Roscosmos.

Bion-M1 carried eight Mongolian gerbils, 45 mice, 15 geckos, slugs and snails and containers with various microorganisms and plants.

The satellite's returnable capsule landed on Sunday in the Russian Orenburg Region near the border with Kazakhstan.

Most of the satellite's "space passengers" failed to survive the flight due to technical faults in the spacecraft. The flight proved fatal for all the eight Mongolian gerbils, 39 out of 45 mice, and its cichlid fish. The geckos, slugs and snails were among the lucky survivors.

"We expected that there would be losses. Experiments that pass off ideally do not exist. We expected that up to a half of animals would return," Sychev said.

Stress could have killed the animals, he suggested.

"The transition to zero gravity could have led to stress which could have provoked a conflict in the group," the scientist said, but admitted the fishes' death was due to technical faults.

"Twelve days after [the start of the space flight], the lights went off, algae [in the fish tank] stopped photosynthesizing, oxygen ceased to be released and the fish died," he said, adding the experiment involving the fish had been carried out by German scientists.

The next flight by a Bion satellite could take place in a higher orbit, Sychev said.

"The [current] flight was at an altitude of 575 km [357 miles] where piloted spacecraft fly. We want [a future satellite] to fly to an altitude of 1,000 km. Conditions there will be tougher," he said.

NASA's Bion project science manager Richard Boyle told a news conference in Russia on behalf of all US specialists involved in the project that scientists were overjoyed at the condition of experimental mice and at how promptly they were delivered to Moscow.

Axolotl: Most vertebrates descended from ancestor with sixth sense

Using the Mexican axolotl as a model to represent the evolutionary lineage leading to land animals, and paddlefish as a model for the branch leading to ray-finned fishes, the researchers found that electrosensors develop in precisely the same pattern from the same embryonic tissue in the developing skin, confirming that this is an ancient sensory system.

People experience the world through five senses but sharks, paddlefishes and certain other aquatic vertebrates have a sixth sense: They can detect weak electrical fields in the water and use this information to detect prey, communicate and orient themselves.

A study in Nature Communications that caps more than 25 years of work finds that the vast majority of vertebrates - some 30,000 species of land animals (including humans) and a roughly equal number of ray-finned fishes - descended from a common ancestor that had a well-developed electroreceptive system.

This ancestor was probably a predatory marine fish with good eyesight, jaws and teeth and a lateral line system for detecting water movements, visible as a stripe along the flank of most fishes. It lived around 500 million years ago. The vast majority of the approximately 65,000 living vertebrate species are its descendants.

"This study caps questions in developmental and evolutionary biology, popularly called 'evo-devo,' that I've been interested in for 35 years," said Willy Bemis, Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a senior author of the paper. Melinda Modrell, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who did the molecular analysis, is the paper's lead author.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a major split in the evolutionary tree of vertebrates. One lineage led to the ray-finned fishes, or actinopterygians, and the other to lobe-finned fishes, or sarcopterygians; the latter gave rise to land vertebrates, Bemis explained.

Some land vertebrates, including such salamanders as the Mexican axolotl, have electroreception and, until now, offered the best-studied model for early development of this sensory system. As part of changes related to terrestrial life, the lineage leading to reptiles, birds and mammals lost electrosense as well as the lateral line.

Some ray-finned fishes - including paddlefishes and sturgeons - retained these receptors in the skin of their heads. With as many as 70,000 electroreceptors in its paddle-shaped snout and skin of the head, the North American paddlefish has the most extensive electrosensory array of any living animal, Bemis said.

Until now, it was unclear whether these organs in different groups were evolutionarily and developmentally the same.

Using the Mexican axolotl as a model to represent the evolutionary lineage leading to land animals, and paddlefish as a model for the branch leading to ray-finned fishes, the researchers found that electrosensors develop in precisely the same pattern from the same embryonic tissue in the developing skin, confirming that this is an ancient sensory system.

The researchers also found that the electrosensory organs develop immediately adjacent to the lateral line, providing compelling evidence "that these two sensory systems share a common evolutionary heritage," said Bemis.

Researchers can now build a picture of what the common ancestor of these two lineages looked like and better link the sensory worlds of living and fossil animals, Bemis said.

Nuclear Clean up: Going through the motions

WASHINGTON — Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter and at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.

A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level radioactive waste.

The Hanford site, overseen by the federal Department of Energy, produced roughly two-thirds of the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, beginning in World War II and ending in the 1980s. Today it is the focus of the nation’s largest environmental cleanup, an effort that has cost tens of billions of dollars and is expected to continue for decades.

Yet the helicopter flights, which covered 13.7 square miles and were paid for with $300,000 in federal stimulus money, took place in an area that had never been used by the bomb makers.

The area had, however, been used by rabbits that had also burrowed into other areas that were contaminated. Many of the contaminants were in the form of salts, which attract wildlife. The rabbits carried strontium and cesium, which emit gamma rays, back out of the area in their digestive tracts.

My Little Pet Zebra - Befriending Animals

IN 2003, while geneticist Svante Pääbo was visiting Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city, he decided to look in on a famous experiment run by the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, which is based in the city. Fifty years ago, the then head of the IC&G, geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, had begun breeding silver foxes to see how easily they could be tamed. What Pääbo didn't know, though, is that Belyaev had also set up another experiment in the 1970s involving rats. This time, one line of rats was selected for tameness and another selected for aggression.

When Pääbo saw them, he was stunned. After just 30 years of selection, the IC&G researchers had fashioned two populations that could hardly be more different. "I could take the tame ones out of the cage with my bare hands. They would creep under my shirt and seemed to actually seek and enjoy contact," recalls Pääbo. "The aggressive animals were so aggressive I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages."

The aggressive rats were so aggressive I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would kill me if they got out of the cage

Here was a great opportunity to uncover the genetic changes responsible for the behavioural differences, Pääbo realised. Back at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Pääbo and his team have been trying to do just this. If they succeed, their findings could have far-reaching consequences.

YouTheria: Predictive Animal Database for Endangered species

A new animalia database that allows users to explore the factors that predispose different mammalian species to extinction – from human encroachment to slow reproductive rate – could be useful in planning conservation schemes, its developers say. Anyone can access the online system, YouTHERIA, which allows users to manipulate parameters including habitat ecology, litter size and diet, and test their own hypotheses.

It relies on a vast database of all known and recently extinct mammals, called PanTHERIA, which lists details of the species' ecology, behaviour, diet, geographical range and habitat, based on more than two decades of published research. The database also records the extent to which each of the 5000-odd species is being impacted by humans and habitat degradation.

Warning signs

Analysis of the database has already highlighted a set of key characteristics – slow reproductive rate being one – which predispose mammals to extinction.

"For example, the Seychelles flying fox isn't declining in abundance now because its habitat is intact," says Andy Purvis, a biodiversity researcher at Imperial College London, who helped produce the tools. "But our database suggests that its slow reproductive rate will predispose it to extinction if and when its habitat is disturbed."

Purvis also recommends that conservationists focus on protecting the tundras of Siberia and Canada, where mammals predisposed to extinction because of slow reproduction, are currently thriving in healthy habitat.

Until now, the database has been restricted to the team of biologists who developed it, but Kate Jones at the Zoological Society of London and colleagues have made it freely available to other researchers, hoping that they will contribute to the data.

Encyclopedia of Life, another collaborative database of species, launched two years ago, has already seen contributions from 2 million people from 200 countries. This week it reached its 150,000th entry.

Journal reference: Ecology, DOI: 10.1890/08-1494.1