Do Not Mess With Fish 233,

and you thought fish were fun!

well not if you have to have this aquarium to keep them in, possibly the two most expensive to build and maintain aquariums in the world is the one aboard the ISS (International Space Station) and its control on earth in Japan, and no the astronauts do not keep goldfish! what they do keep is a fish native to Japan, the medaka, (Oryzias latipes), or Japanese rice fish as it is known, at work we sold two varieties of them, 

silver and gold, the reason that scientists used these fish is that they wanted to study bone growth, in these fish the bone structure in the fish is easy to see and monitor, it had also been observed that these fish and humans share a similar bone growth pattern, it turns out that the effects of microgravity on medaka aren’t much different than our own, the effects just set in much faster, for humans, it takes at least ten days for the symptoms to start showing up, but according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, the fish started losing bone density almost immediately upon arriving in orbit, since humans and medaka grow their skeletons in similar ways, that gives scientists a good starting point to figure out how the process of osteoclasts and osteoblasts actually occurs,

in order to get a closer look at how the fishes bodies reacted to life in space, the scientists genetically modified them so that two different types of cells would glow under different wavelengths of light, as soon as the fish made it to the ISS, they went into a special tank designed for microgravity,

 and were observed from a remote lab at Tsukuba Space Centre using the two different fluorescent lights as their bodies adjusted to their new environment, because the fish reacted so quickly to their new living situation, the researchers were able to observe the effects of microgravity on their bodies almost in real time, almost immediately, numbers of both types of cells increased noticeably when compared to an Earthbound control group, with certain genes going into action in ways not seen in normal gravity, for now, the researchers plan to continue their work with their next batch of fishy astronauts, fish in space whoever thought that would happen?