Shuttle Astronauts Mark a First With Fertilization of Frog Eggs

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The space shuttle Endeavour’s astronauts kept tabs Monday on two fish with electrodes attached to their brains and learned they had scored a space first--fertilizing eggs produced by frogs in orbit.

“It’s the first time we’ve had ovulation (in space) in a higher species, in this case the amphibian,” said principal investigator Ken Souza of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. “We’ve also had fertilization. . . . We now know that the eggs can be fertilized in the absence of gravity.”

The four South African clawed frogs aboard the shuttle were said to be doing well after the developmental “bonanza,” as Souza called it.

All four were injected Sunday with hormones to induce ovulation, but only two provided the 600 eggs that were drenched with sperm. Half the eggs were placed Monday in a centrifuge providing artificial gravity. The others were incubated in micro-gravity.

The fish experiment, meanwhile, encountered a snag.

One of the orange and silver Japanese carp, or koi, became tangled in its electrode line and could not swim around in its cylindrical aquarium. Mark Lee, the astronaut in charge of the shuttle laboratory, reported that the line was twisted 15 to 20 times and looked like a braid.

Japanese scientist Shigeo Mori drilled into the skulls of the carp and surgically attached electrodes to their brains before the fish were loaded into Spacelab for the research mission, which began Saturday.

The electrical activity in the carps’ brains is being recorded during the seven-day flight, with light serving as the stimulus.