Quails in Space!

When I first started looking at stuff about space, one of the first things I read about was all the kinds of animals that we've sent into space. Lots of dogs, monkies, rodents and insects. And surprisingly, lots of quail. Lots and lots of quail. and, until recently, quail as passengers and not as food. Though I don't typically think of qual as food, having grown up in california where our state bird is perhaps one of the silliest creatures on Earth. No, I think of quail as those little birds with the floofs on top of their heads that run in front of your car with all of their offspring following suit.

But really, quail eggs are quite frequently sent into space. Now I can take a gander why they'd send bird eggs to space, but I couldn't quite figure out why quail, of all birds, were chosen. I still don't really know, but I've learned some interesting things. Basically, they send quail eggs in space at varrying stages of their development to test the effects of microgravity on development. I was actually having a difficult time finding stuff on the interwebz about the nature of thee experiemtns, if quail had actually been hatched, or if they were simply incubated adn then hatched on earth. I got a lot of stuff about food. But then I came across this one which sheds a bit of light onto what exactly they were doing with quail in space and why. Gives a lot of good reasons for raising birds, and finally answered my question about why they use quails and not other birds. The reason, basically, is that quails develop faster. makes sense. A lot of the reasoning behind choosing quail for this type of experiment has to do with saveing resources in space, one huge resource being, um... well space. and I guess with birds you don't have to have a pregnant mother, so you don't have to deal with feeding or cleaning up the poop of the pregnant mother when all they really wanted to know was how the babies were developing.

So while the reason for quails in space isn't as bizzare as I had imagined, its still a fascinating little bit of space exploration, and something I fully intend to use. I'll probably look into it further, but for now this is good enough for me.