Fruit fly sperm is enormous
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. They may have tiny bodies, but fruit flies produce giant sperm. Adult male Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies are about two millimeters long (roughly the size of a sesame seed) and their sperm can be just as long, with the sperm tails taking up most of that space. In order to keep the thousands of sperm cells inside their bodies untangled, the insects use movement in an ingenious way. The sperm cells are organized into densely aligned groups that move by pushing off one another to keep themselves more taut. The more taut, the less likely it is that the tails will get tangled. The findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature Physics. Fruit fly sperm are about 40 …
