The mechanics of air-breathing in anuran larvae: Implications to the development of amphibians in microgravity

Because of their rapid development, amphibians have been important model organisms in studies of how microgravity (μG) affects vertebrate growth and differentiation. Both urodele (salamanders) and anuran (frogs and toads) embryos have been raised in orbital flight, the latter several times. The most commonly reported and striking effects of μG on tadpoles are not in the vestibular system, as one might suppose, but in their lungs and tails. Pathological changes in these organs disrupt behavior and retard larval growth.What causes malformed (typically lordotic) tadpoles in μG is not known, nor have axial pathologies been reported in every flight experiment. Lung pathology, however, has been consistently observed and is understood to result from the failure of the animals to inflate their lungs in a timely and adequate fashion. We suggest that malformities in the axial skeleton of tadpoles raised in μG are secondary to problems in respiratory function.We have used high speed videography to investigate how tadpoles breathe air in the 1G environment. The video images reveal alternative species-specific mechanisms, that allow tadpoles to separate air from water in less that 150 ms. We observed nothing in the biomechanics of air-breathing in 1G that would preclude these same mechanisms from working in μG. Thus our kinematic results suggest that the failure of tadpoles to inflate their lungs properly in μG is due to the tadpoles' inability to locate the air-water interface and not a problem with the inhalation mechanism per se.