[itishappy]

> And this, so far as I know, is a completely unexplored question.

To date, no mammals have given birth in space. We sent pregnant mice and had them return to Earth to give birth, and we've sent mouse zygotes and grown them in space, but no birth!

[floxy]

Mice in space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7lgj3aZ8dU

[somenameforme]

That video is awesome. This [1] seems to be a pertinent paper. One thing I don't understand is why we intentionally limit the experiments. Having male + female and then running the experiment through generations seems like it would be vastly more informative. For instance that 'race tracking' behavior around the cage, only seemed to emerge in young mice. What sort of new behaviors, adaptions, etc will emerge in the first generation born entirely in low g?

Or perhaps even the 2nd generation could be even more telling. Why not simply run the experiment until they all die off, or go full Malthus? Another interesting idea would be to create a faux terrarium type enclosure instead of a plain cage. Would the mice exhibit a bias towards the "ground"? And also it's kind of odd that none of the studies thought to include a lens wiper for their cameras after the first one demonstrated the problem. In 0g, various 'matter' ends up getting stuck on the camera lens, increasingly trending towards 0 visibility.

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40789-y