Science & Technology - Posted by Judy Holmes-Syracuse on Thursday, August 2, 2012 10:57 - 1 Comment 
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Slower fruit fly sperm may win the race
Genetically modified green and red sperm swim through the female fruit fly's reproductive tract. “The finding that longer sperm were more successful is consistent with earlier studies,” says Stefan Lüpold. “However, the finding that slower sperm also have an advantage is counterintuitive.” (Credit: Stefan Lüpold/Syracuse U.)
SYRACUSE U. (US) — It’s assumed that faster sperm have an edge in the race to fertilize the egg—but slower swimmers may have an advantage over their faster rivals.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The study, recently published online in Current Biology and forthcoming in print on September 25, was conducted by a team of scientists led by corresponding author Stefan Lüpold, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department at Syracuse University.
The team made the discovery using fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) that were genetically altered so that the heads of their sperm glow fluorescent green or red under the microscope. The fruit flies, developed by biologist John Belote, enable researchers to observe sperm in real time inside the female reproductive tract.
“Sperm competition is a fundamental biological process throughout the animal kingdom, yet we know very little about how ejaculate traits determine which males win contests,” says Lüpold, a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow working in the laboratory of biology professor Scott Pitnick.
“This is the first study that actually measures sperm quality under competitive conditions inside the female, allowing us to distinguish the traits that are important in each of the reproductive phases.”
The research is also significant because the scientists studied naturally occurring variations in sperm traits, rather than manipulating the test populations for specific traits. After identifying and isolating groups of males with similar ejaculate traits that remained constant across multiple generations, the scientists mated single females with pairs of males from the different groups.
“This approach allowed us to simultaneously investigate multiple ejaculate traits and also observe how sperm from one male change behavior depending upon that of rival sperm,” Lüpold says.
Female fruit flies mate about every three days. Sperm from each mating swim through the female bursa into a storage area until eggs are released. Eggs travel from the ovaries into the bursa to await the sperm.
However, sperm battles actually take place within the storage area. After each mating, new sperm try to toss sperm from previous matings out of storage. The female then ejects the displaced sperm from the reproductive system, eliminating the ejected sperm from the mating game.
The researchers observed that longer and slower-moving sperm were better at displacing their rivals and were also less likely to be ejected from storage than their more agile counterparts.
“The finding that longer sperm were more successful is consistent with earlier studies,” Lüpold says. “However, the finding that slower sperm also have an advantage is counterintuitive.”
Why slower sperm have an advantage is still open to speculation. “It could be that, when swimming back and forth in storage, slower sperm hit the exit less frequently and are therefore less likely to be pushed out,” Lüpold says.
“Or, because sperm velocity is dependent on the density of sperm within the narrow storage area, it could be that velocity isn’t really the target of sexual selection in fruit flies, but is rather a consequence of the amount of sperm packed into the storage organ.”
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Swiss National Science Foundation funded the study.
More news from Syracuse University: http://asnews.syr.edu/
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Fluorescent labeled fruit fly sperm racing through the reproductive tract of a female Drosophila melanogaster. The sperm from one male are labeled with a green marker and sperm from another male are labeled with a much fainter red marker. Read more about the high stakes world of sperm competition at Not Exactly Rocket Science, which recently moved to Discover Blogs.