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An animal such as a crayfish relies on gravity to keep its circulatory system running. If it is turned upside down, the gravity works against the system, suffocating the animal. Now if, instead of placing the animal on it's back, we were to take take it to a space station, gravity would not be working against it, and random blood flow plus capillary action should get some blood flowing. Would the animal survive this?

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I believe that fruit flies have been taken aboard the Space Shuttle for experiments. They survived and the adults have an open circulatory system.

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Would a larger animal survive? – jmusser Mar 15 '12 at 13:07
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You'll have to dig a bit to see what is known. I vaguely recall that spiders went into orbit as well, likely to observe web-spinning behavior and characteristics. The link I provided may give you a place to poke around NASA's biology pages. If you're real serious about this, I could ask a Shuttle astronaut I know, but she is training for another mission and may not be able to provide any reply. – Larry_Parnell Mar 15 '12 at 18:26
Thanks for the reply :-) – jmusser Mar 16 '12 at 1:53

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