It’s Friday, and at the end of a long week, sometimes it’s good to look back over the news cycle and find something adorbz to carry you into the weekend. There was one extremely cute story, in my opinion at least, that we didn’t have time to cover on Wednesday. That story? It was the launch of tiny, cute, baby squid to the ISS. 

128 BABY BOBTAIL SQUID were launched on SpaceX’s most recent resupply mission. These tiny, sea creatures are just three millimeters long but have complex bodies that, like human bodies, interact with a microbiome of helpful bacteria. While we do our best to study how astronauts are affected by microgravity, we can’t launch 128 astronauts all at once to do a nice controlled experiment. This is where the squid come in. They were launched in a semi-frozen state to save them from a lot of the stress of takeoff and will now be thawed, allowed to do their happy baby squid thing, and ultimately returned to Earth. 

Why Squid? It turns out that as different as humans and squid may seem, our immune systems are actually pretty similar to that of our cephalopod cousins. In an interview with the BBC, researcher Jaime Foster explained: As astronauts explore space, they’re taking with them a company of different microbial species. And it’s really important to understand how those microbes, collectively called the microbiome, change in the space environment and how those relationships are established.

As a reminder, the microbiome living on and in your body does everything from aid in digestion to eating up the moisture around your eyes while you sleep. While it’s gross to think about, it’s actually super cool and super necessary for our health.

More Information

Nasa to launch baby squid to International Space Station (BBC)