Astronematode, predatory worms in space: GotG6

It’s Sunday morning, and Ryan is still asleep, and I got a bit bored and started playing around with one of those “blog title generators”. (For those of you for whom this is a new concept, they generate click-bait style headlines for a topic you give them.)

Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA 

Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

If you’ve got a small garden then you might find it difficult to find space for a conventional compost heap. A possible solution is a worm compost bin, which takes up far less space because an army of worms does most of the composting work.

Over our heads, on the International Space Station, chilli peppers are blooming and being hand-pollinated by astronauts.

Worms were the only survivors when space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. Caenorhabditis elegans, nematodes, had been sent into space to test a synthetic nutrient solution. Their naturally short life-span meant that the survivors were several generations removed from the worms that were blasted into space at the beginning of the mission. Nematodes experiments have also been conducted on the International Space Station (ISS), looking at the effect of microgravity – it turns out that these worms can suffer muscle mass loss in the same way as humans do. Nematodes weren’t the only worms included on that fateful mission; among the student experiments (which included space bees) was one that aimed to investigate mealworms (Tenebrio molitor). Sadly they didn’t survive.

So… we have a few hundred more mouths to feed, as I went to a Master Composter training day at the weekend, and during the afternoon we made our own wormeries out of stacking plastic crates, and were each given a couple of handfuls of composting worms to get us started.

In the Hi-Seas habitat in Hawaii, analog astronauts take part in simulated space missions. Ben Greaves joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the isolation, the dehydrated diet, and his experiment growing microgreens in space-age hydrogel.

Join Emma the Space Gardener in the Gardeners of the Galaxy time machine to learn about the time that NASA encouraged schoolchildren all over the world to grow killer mutant space tomatoes. That can’t be right, can it?

Join Emma the Space Gardener on the Tiangong space station to learn about China’s botanical experiments in space, and why Chinese consumers are eagerly awaiting rice from heaven. Plus – what was the first plant grown in space?

Header image: Rendering of Tiangong Space Station in late July 2022, along with June 2022 with Tianhe core module in the middle, Wentian lab module on the left, Tianzhou cargo spacecrafts on right, and Shenzhou-14 crewed spacecraft at nadir. Image credit Shujianyang via Wikipedia.

In 2020, Morgan Irons made space exploration history when she sent the first Earth soils to the International Space Station. Morgan joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the importance of soil structure on Earth, why she sent soil into space, and how we might develop living soils on Mars.