Purdue News

October 24, 1989 Second Generation Of "Space Chicks" Hatches West Lafayette, Ind. – The second generation of "space chicks" in an experiment involving Purdue University and Kentucky Fried Chicken finished hatching Tuesday morning (10/24). The experiment may help determine, among other things, the potential for human reproduction in space. The chicks, which began hatching Monday (10/23), are offspring of now-mature chickens that either were embryos when they rode the space shuttle Discovery this past March or were embryos that remained on Earth as a control group. A total of 47 eggs were put in the incubator, with 28 hatching. Purdue Professor Patricia Hester, who monitors the birds' development, said this 60 percent hatch-rate is normal considering the young age of the hens (25 weeks) when the eggs were laid, and that the eggs were smaller. She added that the chicks are doing fine. Some of the 28 chicks that hatched are from space parents, Hester said, but declined to say exactly how many. Three more hatches are planned in the next three months, and Hester said she wanted to wait until all the data on those hatches are in to comment on the reproductive capability of the space parents. "We're still collecting data," said Hester, professor of animal sciences. "Three more hatches will give us a good idea whether space travel affected the hens' reproductive capability." John Vellinger, the Purdue student who designed the experiment, said the newborn chicks look like "little bumblebees." "Seeing this second generation of space chicks brought back memories of when the first space chick hatched last March," said Vellinger, a senior in mechanical engineering. "The second generation, like their parents, appear to be normal at this point in time." The shuttle carried on board two different groups of embryos: 16 two-day-old eggs and 16 nine-day-old eggs. Identical groups of eggs remained on Earth as controls. Half of the eggs in each of the four groups were opened and examined immediately after the shuttle landed, which left a total of 32 chickens to incubate until hatching. All of the nine-day-old group hatched (16 of them). The only two-day-olds that hatched (eight of them) were those that had remained on Earth and, except for zero gravity, had been subjected to the same conditions of acceleration, vibration, temperature and humidity as were their space counterparts. A total of 21 parents are left from the experimental and control groups. Three died during the maturing process, which, Hester says, is not uncommon. The parents and their offspring live at the Baker-Purdue Animal Sciences Center about 10 miles north of Lafayette, Ind. Vellinger and Purdue Professor Ronald Hullinger, his adviser on the project, are trying to determine when the two-day-old embryos that went into space died. They are studying X-rays of the embryos' bone formation and such things as distance from the crown of the head to where the tail attaches on the rump, length of the toes and of the bones in the wings, and size of the head and beak. "These are all indices of embryo age, and we hope they will overlap, which will tell us the age at which the chicks stopped developing," said Hullinger, professor of veterinary embryology. "We can examine an embryo any time after conception and know how its development should look." The results of the analysis should shed light on the potential for human reproduction in space. Hullinger and Vellinger expect to complete the analysis by the end of the year. "We can't say yet whether people will have trouble developing in space," Hullinger said. "The evidence so far suggests, given the deaths of the two-day-old embryos, that mammals might have a problem developing in space." Hester; Ken Wolber, Purdue poultry farm manager; and Patrick Sharp, Purdue veterinary medical student, have conducted scores of tests on the parents to find out whether space travel had any effect on them. The tests include perching ability, reproductive capability, daily weight gain and various blood tests. Hester and Professor Tim Jones of the University of Nebraska's School of Dentistry also did tests on inner-ear equilibrium. Hester said she hasn't seen anything out of the ordinary among the space hens and roosters. "We really won't know for sure until we analyze the computer data, but just glancing at it, we don't see any differences that could be attributed to space travel," she said. Some of the same tests conducted on the parents will be repeated with the second-generation space chickens. Unless something unexpected shows up in those tests, the experiment with the second generation will conclude when those chickens reach market weight (four pounds) at seven weeks. "If zoos are interested in taking the second-generation chicks, we'll be more than happy to donate them," Hester said. "We're not going to keep them for further testing unless we really see something out of the ordinary." Sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken Corp., the experiment should provide insight not only on the potential for human reproduction in space but on the problems of bone-mass loss and motion sickness among astronauts, and chickens' potential as a food source in space. Researchers from Boston University, Tulane University, University of Illinois and University of Massachusetts also are involved in the project. Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu